Watson, Ian - SSC (14 page)

 
          
“Yet
I wonder, Dr. Thibaud, what if error is an essential part of our life process?
What if, in order to be able to grow, we must also be able to die?”

           
“Yes indeed—the cruel dialectic of
Nature!”

           
“Well then, what part has the
cancer cell to play? It’s the only truly immortal cell. It alone copies itself
perfectly, without any error. And it kills us by doing so.”

           
“The difference between cell
replication and cell differentiation is a knife edge we must all balance on,
M’sieur Rosen.”

 
          
“Yet
we all have cancer, potentially. Viral cancer lurks in everyone’s cells in a
latent form, did you know? I want to know why. Doctors perpetually set
themselves up to cure cancer—to cure polio, to cure everything else they label
as disease. And that’s supposed to be the whole work of medicine. But how many
doctors ever trouble to glance at the whole system of life and evolution that a
‘disease’ functions in?
None whatever!”

 
          
A
cat— a mangy, skinny alley-tabby—pounced on the invisible prey that it had been
wriggling its way towards all the time they talked. But almost at once it leapt
away again. Its fur stood on end, its tail bushed out, as it backed cowering
into the corner of its pen.

 
          
“Did
you see that, M’sieur Rosen? You could call it a catastrophe, in your
terms—that sudden switch from fight to flight.
The mouse
becoming a monster in its mind.
Yet how much do we really see? It’s as
you say about medicine—scratching the surface. Examining the arc of the circle
and thinking that’s all there is to the figure! But the inner landscape of the
dream must be just as important as the actions. If not more so! In fact, I’m
inclined to think the full subtleties of the genotype can only be coded into
the dream as environment.
Yet how to show that?
Still,
we’re only starting on our journey inwards. Come, see the darkroom. We raise
some other cats in black light and isolation from birth, so that they display
the perfect archetype of a dream . . .”

 
          
The
alley-tabby awoke, as they retraced their steps, and whined from the fretful
exhaustion of having slept.

           
“Presumably, in an archetypal
setting . . .”
          
 
Their glider bounded over the turf as the
winch driver heeded the blinking of the aldis lamp from the control caravan,
then slid smoothly into the air, climbing gently towards and upward of the
winchgear. Mary pulled back softly on the stick, increasing the angle of climb
to balance the downpull of the cable, till at eighty degrees to the winch and
an altitude of a thousand feet she dipped the nose briefly, pushed the cable
release knob,
then
climbed away.

 
          
“What
if it doesn’t let go?”

 
          
“It
disconnects automatically, if you’re at a right angle to the winch—which you
shouldn’t let happen.”

 
          
“It
could jam.”

 
          
“There’s
a weak link in the chain, Adrian.
By design.
It’s
fail-safe.” But she sounded exasperated.

 
          
The
hill upcurrent sent the glider climbing towards scattered woolly cumulus in a
sky which was the blue of a pack of French cigarettes, as Mary manipulated the
controls efficiently, banking, centralizing and taking off rudder, then
repeating the same turning maneuver with a minimum of slip and skid. And so
they spiralled aloft.

 
          
Her
hair blazed back in the wind when the glider did slip to the right briefly on
one turn, uncovering the firm rhombus of her cheek-bones, and a number of small
brown moles just in front of the hair line. For a redhead her skin was only
lightly freckled. It resembled the grain
of an old photograph
more than distinct freckles
. Adrian loved touching and stroking those
few hidden blemishes when they were in bed together, but it generally took a
strong wind to whip the bonfire of hair back from them.

 
          
“So
you’re set on going to France?” she said at last. “I think Geraghty would
rather Oliver went.”

           
“Oliver doesn’t have my special
interest.”

           
“What interest? It’s nonsense!”

           
“You know very well.”

           
“I know nothing of the sort! You’re
perfectly healthy. Why else do you refuse to take a medical? It would show how
wrong you are.”

 
          
“I
can . . . examine myself. The dreams, you see. It would spoil everything to
have some silly check-up. It would ruin the experience. I must keep perfectly
clear and neutral.”

 
          
The
glider skidded badly then, as Mary angrily used a bootful of rudder, and the
nose began hunting, pitching to and fro.

 
          
“You
realize you’re wrecking our relationship? Your scientific credibility too!
If that matters to you!”

 
          
“My
dreams have a shape to them. I have
to.
. . live them
out.”

           
Correcting the trim of the machine,
Mary
spiralled
the glider through the wool-pack,
avoiding entering cloud. They soared above the snow cocoons into open sky; the
clouds swept by below them now like detergent froth on rivers of the air—the
vale and Downs being the soft clefted base of this surge of translucent
streams. They continued a stable upward helix for another few hundred feet till
uplift weakened and Mary swung the machine away towards a thermal bubble on
which another pilot was rising a mile away, in company with dark specks of
swifts and swallows catching the insects borne up along with the air.

 
          
But
if they’d entered cloud, reflected Adrian, and if another pilot had also done
so, and the curves of the two gliders intersected in the wooly fog, then
there’d have been . . . discontinuity: a catastrophe curve.

 
          
Marguerite
Ponty accepted the infra-red goggles back from Thibaud and Rosen to hang on the
hook outside the second of two doors labelled
DEFENSE d’eclairage!

 
          
The
slim woman’s dark glossy eyes were heavily accented by violet eye shadow which
made huge pools of them; as though, having spent too many hours in null-light
conditions tending to the darkroom cats, her senses were starting to adapt.

 
          
Her
hair was short and spiky, gamine-style. She wore dirty plimsolls, blue jeans
and a raggy sweater under her white labcoat, the loops of the knitting pulled
and unravelled by cats’ claws.
From her ears hung magnificent
golden Aztec pyramids of ear-rings.
Her scent was a strange mix of
patchouli and cat urine: clotted sweetness and gruelly tartness grating
piquantly together.

 
          
“The
pons area is lesioned at one year old,” Thibaud commented. “They’ve never seen
anything.
Never met any other cat but their mother.
Yet in their dreams they prowl the same basic genetic landscape. The computer
tells us how they show the same choreography—only purified, abstracted. What
is it, I wonder?
A Paul Klee universe?
A Kandinsky cosmos?
Has anyone unwittingly painted the
genetic ikons?”

           
“Let’s hope not Mondrian,” laughed
Marguerite. “What a bore!”

 
          
“Blind
people dream,” Rosen reminded him. “Surely they don’t visualize. They smell,
they hear, they touch.”

 
          
“And
out of this construct their landscape, yes.
Same thing.
It’s the putting together that matters.
The shaping.”

 
          
“Topology.”

 
          
“Exactly.
I was only using a metaphor. Let me use another:
our blacklight cats are dancing to the same tune as our sighted tribe. Yet they
experience next to nothing in their lives.”

 
          
Rosen
couldn’t help glancing pointedly at Marguerite Ponty’s looped and ragged
sweater. They experienced her.

 
          
“
Which proves that dreams are control tapes for the genes, not ways
of processing our daily lives.
But come. It is time to show you our
cancer ward. We use nitrosoethylurea to induce tumors of the nervous
system—thus the immune battle is fought out within the memory network itself!
The basic instinctive drives yield right of way to a more urgent metabolic problem.
You’ll see the shape of catastrophe danced. That’s what you came for.”

 
          
Rosen
grinned.

 
          
“Immune
dreams, yes. But what landscape do they dance them in?”

 
          
“Ah,
there you ask the vital question.”

 
          
Another day.
Another flight.
Another landing.
And Rosen had been to France, by now.

 
          
Mary
pointed the glider down steeply towards the two giant chalk arrows cut in the
field.

           
It struck him that she was diving
too steeply; but not so, apparently, for she raised the nose smartly to bring
them out of the dive flying level a few feet above the ground, the first arrow
passing underneath them, then the second. They slowed as she closed the
airbrakes, pulling the stick right back to keep the nose level, till they
practically hovered to a touchdown so perfect that there was no perceptible
transition between sky and ground. She threw the airbrakes fully open, and they
were simply stationary.

 
          
Cursorily
she rearranged her hair.

 
          
“Nature’s
so bloody conservative,” Adrian persisted. “It has to be, damn it, or there
wouldn’t be any Nature! You can’t have constant random mutations of the
genotype. Or you’d always be losing on the swings what you won on the
roundabouts. So once a particular coding gets fixed, it’s locked rigidly in
place. All the code shifts that have led from die first cells through to
cabbages and
kings,
have operated upon redundant DNA,
not the main genome. Look around, Mary. How diverse it all seems!
Sheep.
Grass.
Birds,
insects, ourselves.
So much variety.
Yet
genetically speaking it’s almost an illusion. Quality control is too strict for
it to be any other way. Just think of the Histone IV gene for DNA
protein-binding. That’s undergone hardly any change since people and vegetables
had a common ancestor a billion and a half years ago. Biological conservatism,
that’s the trick! But what’s the most conservative cell we know?”

 
          
“Cancer,
I suppose,” admitted Mary. “What are you driving at now?”

 
          
“Quality
control to the nth degree!” he rhapsodized. “That’s cancer. And now we know
there’s viral cancer lying latent in everyone’s cells. It’s part of our genetic
inheritance. Why, I ask you?”

 
          
“To
warn the immune system,” Mary replied brightly. “When a cell goes cancerous,
the virus has a chance to show its true colors as an alien. Our immune system
couldn’t possibly recognize cancer as hostile tissue otherwise.”

 
          
“Very plausible!
Then why’s the system so damned
inefficient, if we’ve got these built-in alarms? Why do so many people still
die of cancer? Have medical researchers ever asked that, eh? Of course not!
They never think about the whole system of life, only about correcting its
supposed flaws.”

 
          
“Maybe
more cancers get stopped early on than we realize?”

 
          
Adrian
laughed.

 
          
“So
you think we may be having low-level cancer attacks all the time—as often as we
catch a cold? There’s an idea! But I fancy that viral cancer’s not locked up in
our cells to warn the immune system at all. The reason’s quite different. And
it’s so obvious I’m surprised no one’s thought of it. Cancer’s there to control
the quality of replication of the genotype—because cancer’s the perfect
replicator.”