I nodded. Metre square perspex cabinets reached to the ceiling. He opened the door of the nearest, making the rubber seals give with a faint smack, then pulled out a partitioned tray.
"Here we have a hundred samples. As you see, they are healthily diverse. Only two are non-viable, which is about the norm."
I scanned along the rows. Most were shaped like bahjis, still and ranging from ochre to mottled green. He raised an index finger above an especially gnarled specimen.
"This one, for instance, looks like becoming an extremity."
I fumbled for an apt question, eager to display interest. "And how long do they stay here?"
"Oh, their bulk growth lasts maybe a month as the crow flies. Then they move onto the theatres. If you are successful in your application I imagine you will be working in this department under me." He smiled and as an afterthought glanced at his fobwatch. "Well, it's soon time for your interview. I'd better get you back. All the best".
On the maglev back to Benares I loosened my tie and reviewed my interview technique with satisfaction. The glowing recommendation from my Prof had taken all the steam out of the questioning panel. One or two perfunctory questions about my hobbies and "wider issues" and they were shaking my hand, then each others.
From my case I took out a whodunnit, one of a series set in London during the eighties when drugs were cheap and all twists believable. The foot of the girl opposite was beating time to the sizzle of her walkman, her eyes closed. Her badges proclaimed that she was anti-U.S., anti-genetic- engineering and pro-love. Beside her lay her course ROMs. Her reading pad lay precariously on her lap, precariously enough for me to warn her, perhaps. Or maybe I could stretch a leg close enough for hers to hit mine. Across the aisle two kids were playing some old board game, arguing till their mother pointed at me. They looked and went silent. Beside her was an imported pet. Leg coordination being an unsolved problem, it was limbless. Owners could buy special trolleys to take them for walks or purchase the latest in Delhi fashions; a sari with a big pouch on one hip. This one was in a traditional wicker basket.
The girl's eyes were still closed.
Outside, the sun was setting with bare-limbed men leading their cows back to mud-and- dung homesteads. The World Development Funds had not spread from the railway lines as hoped; it leaked from the ends in the form of new stations, industrial sites and an occasional ingenious but inappropriate piece of hardware dumped for children to play on. Technology, even the jihads and fundamentalism of past decades had left the countryside untouched. I wondered how soon it would be before the cows were replaced. Walking wastes protein.
Tired, I laid aside my book and rested back to enjoy the free ride. The student took one bored glance at me as my stretching leg hit hers, then melted back into her Reggae.
My parents were still up when the rickshaw dropped me home. Entering our house felt like walking into an old grandfather clock, a remnant of the Raj.
"I'll fry you something", my mother said, fussing over some soggy samosas.
"I've eaten thankyou"
"How did you get on?" asked my father, turning off the TV.
"They as good as offered me the job."
"It is a great honor to have a son working at such a famous establishment".
"I told them I'd reply three-morrow."
"Jobs like that aren't easy to come by these days," said mother, "but you're old enough to decide for yourself, Joe"
My mother likes to think that her age gives her experience. She repeats what she heard her own mother say. I have only slowly come to respect my parents. I used to resent having nothing to kick against except their anxious concern. They both left school early and do not understand that my awards and publications confer honor enough. They were born in a farming village and on marrying moved to a suburb upstream form Benares where for a few years they lived simply while they saved. Those years are special to them, their secret. In their albums there any some photos of one or other of them in a boat they bought and spent much time in, judging by their reminiscences, until they moved inland to a more affluent sector. My father worked his way from the bottom of his firm. To him I owe my patience and weak chest. My brains by default come from my mother. Happy with each other they have never been gregarious; I've had to make my own way in society.
"It will be a big step," she continued, "here in Benares you have many friends".
"They all have holophones. You should get one father. You can afford it now."
"One day maybe", he replied, yawning. "Besides, if holophones are so good, then why did you bother travelling so far today for the interview?"
"Holophones are for seeing people, not places. It interested me greatly, but..."
"But?"
"but when my friends find out I'm working there..."
"Ah, friends like Aziz you mean", interrupted father, "yes, there you may be having a problem."
Mother went to bed. Father stayed on, trying to have a man-to-man talk with me. Seeing my lack of cooperation, he left too. I squeezed myself some lime juice and returned to the news channel. Watching the statistics and disasters of the day I weighed up the pros and cons of acceptance. My thoughts kept drifting back to the girl on the train with her badges and ideals. I'd worked too hard at Benares University to leave time to meet girls like her, and joining the research centre would end any chance I had. But one overriding factor won through; I wanted to leave home, start again. I'd had offers from Caltech and Oxford but I felt I owed my country something. I distrust imperialist powers. The gandhi dynasty began the drive against coca-colonialisation in all its guises. We are a strong nation and need only the time to grow, or so my father has taught me. He sees the Maglev network which has grown across India as invasive and the Centre as an artificial stimulant for a nation with a plethora of natural remedies. To me it was a lifeline. Within a week I had moved away.
I was assigned to Dr. Jacobs who continued excitedly from where he'd left off a week before. "The hard part is done working on the DNA. We've optimised the nursery conditions but without the correct molecular binding sites it's hopeless. We're trying to incorporate into animals genes that code for chlorophyll and associated processes, but the cycles interfere with each other. Using NMR I've tried dynamic analysis and I think there's a catalyst problem; they're not being released from one cycle fast enough for use in another. We just throw it all together and hope that dysfunctioning cycles become redundant, leaving the fittest to work in peace. During specialisation these dormant cycles sometimes re-activate though."
He looked at me, flattening his wild grey hair with a brisk wipe of his hand. I was trying to work out some analogy between cycles and nations.
"Perhaps you're wondering where you fit in? We want to improve our computer simulation and your experience in parallel programming will be most useful. You'll be a parallel to us, so to speak. You'll be joining an illustrious group. I think our main contribution is in the application of electromagnetic fields to polarise and shape the blastosphere. After the nursery, the surgeons move in. Sticking on legs and eyes, that's all their concern. They harvest the organs of write-offs, freezing them until they have enough for a new animal. We suppress nerve development until after surgery to retain flexibility, them later the nerves grow through the reassembled flesh. Unfortunately, the grafts don't always take. We can clone the components and replicate the surgery but there's no guarentee that we'll get anything in the end. Yields are slowly improving all the same."
I stayed a few days at a hotel near the centre. As night fell I watched crippled beggars drag themselves from shop to shop, and bodies wrapped in grey rags appear in doorways like cobwebs at nightfall. These sights distressed me more than usual. I began programming at the centre long into the night; not what I wanted but there was little else to do. The townfolk shunned me once they knew where I worked so I found a place in a residential block where another researcher lived. Dr. Khan worked in Lab 4, the secret wing. I came to know a few of the workers there through eating with Khan. My first meal with them served only to confirm rumours of their eccentricity. I soon lost track of who was saying what.
"Hello fatso"
"Hi", replied Khan, "this is Joe Vindi".
"So you're the computer boffin we've all heard about".
"Guess so", I said.
"About time we had new blood. Many major breakthroughs this morning Khan?"
"I might be onto something"
"Khan's being especially modest today, Joe. If he got a call from the Nobel committee I'd swear the first thing he'd say would be `how many?'"
Khan laughed with the rest. "As you see Joe, Long John thinks himself a wit but he's only half right."
"And two rights don't make a wrong unless you're that surgeon who once put two right feet on my chimera."
"or unless you're a schitzophrenic fascist, haha. Pakistan, Kalistan, where will it all end? Khanistan?"
"Which section are you assigned to, Joe?"
"Nursery"
"Jacobs will get you to computerise his record card system if you're not careful. Don't listen to him. Stick to your brief. We're going to need you one day. And don't get too mixed up with experimentation; it encourages shallow thought. Not that mega-mouth Jacobs needs the encouragement. He's got this idea that by painstaking research and good honest sweat all will be revealed, bit by bit. The million monkeys approach. Why we even employ western scientists here I don't know."
"Shosha likes saying nasty things about people, Joe, especially behind their backs; she calls it `putting things into perspective'."
"You've heard what we do, Joe? We study science in the traditional Indian way; we keep researching till we stumble upon something that a better financed lab discovered months before."
"As Sheldrake predicted."
"Oh god. Not another Sheldrakean. One was bad enough, now they're all over the place."
"As Sheldrake predicted".
I was the knot in their recreational tug of war; they were bouncing insults off my steadfast neutrality. But they were a friendly, albeit secretive group who soon accepted me, after a fashion. It helped that I was nominally a hindu; after the bloodshed of Kalistan's independence, others were mistrusted.
My parents phoned regularly from their residential post office. Squeezed into the holobooth they asked how I was getting on, whether I was eating ok and if I'd made any friends. I noticed for the first time my mother's mannerisms; the way she preceded her interruptions with a licking of lips. Her hair was streaking grey, making her look more distinguished than a housewife. Their love for each other touched me. One by one my friends, even some close ones, failed to reply to my calls; the centre's reputation saw to that. Set up to stimulate indigenous vivindustries, the centre had attracted some of the more important names in the field but as the years passed and no breakthroughs emerged, the grants were reduced and publications ceased, along with the protesters at the gates
After four months hammering on a U.S. ParaComp, part of a consignment belatedly updating our equipment, I found time to return to Benares, the world's oldest extant city so they say. Vultures perched on temple walls, tourists trailed their hands through the dawn sky's reflection and bodies still took three hours to burn. I'd hoped that my parents might have missed me but they had started using my room to store crates of food. I bundled together all my keepsakes in a suitcase which I slid under my bed. I brought my parents back a product from the commercial section, a docile little thing called a goojee which they accepted as if it were something I had made at school. A common sight in the west, they were a sign of influence in India.
"Just feed it with scraps," I said, "and give it these pills once a week".
Their generation had seen more changes than any other; from ox-drawn plough to helix 3D TV and designer creatures. My parents got used to the pet, even bringing it to the holobooth sometimes. They had trained the little ball of fluff to type my number out with its snout. "We call her Haliz", my mother said. Strange, I thought, how people tended to feminize chimerae. My mother looked tired, crowsfeet had suddenly appeared by her eyes. She was dressed in her best sari with the brooch I had bought her from my first week's wages. I suddenly remembered that Haliz was the name that my aunt had given to her short-lived first child; a mongol who had slipped through the screening, a survivor. I blushed for my mother, sure she was unaware of the coincidence.
"Anything wrong?" my father asked.
"No. The monsoon's on its way. It's very humid here"
"She's peeling", said mother. "Do they get sunburn?"
"I don't know. Are you giving it the selenium pills?"
"Yes dear. Saw a funny thing this morning". She started giggling. "There was-"
"Joe doesn't want to hear about that", father said.
"But it was very, very funny. You see..." and she started laughing helplessly.
"No dear", my father interrupted firmly. "Joe, we'll be going now. Don't stay away too long will you?" He stared at me grimly, turning off before I could reply.
My work was going well. The job wasn't highly paid but the independence suited me. So often my peers accumulate information until it reaches a critical mass that explodes in even the dullest minds. They work away like chained goats on their circles of grass, there is no leap beyond their perceptual lassoo of expectation. In those early months I was the only one on the machine. I could test elaborate hypotheses as fast as anyone in the world. Clues are so much easier seen looking back. The difficult part is getting to the end; then it's all so obvious. I ran simulations overnight and worked back through their output. I developed an algorithm based on my professor's work which accelerated my progress even more. One dinner time I went over to Lab 4 to show them my first results. No one replied so I tried one or two combinations on the door. Khan's car number opened it. I walked in and a menagerie of exotic animals began knocking on their cages. I stared at them, quite unable to relate them to the marrow-like things I'd seen on sale. I could see why the researchers no longer published their discoveries. A movement on the nearby table made me start. A beast as long as my forearm, hairless and puce, was crawling towards me. Five backbones grew from its limbless sacrum. One outer spine was stunted, dragged sideways as the others clawed foreward. Seeing me, two serpentine heads reared, cackled, fell and then all five turned away. I was not considered a danger.
"I think she likes you. Play your cards right and you could be in there." Khan was standing in the doorway. "We'd just gone to pick you up for dinner. Don't worry, I won't report you, you'd have found out anyway, sooner or later. Well, what do you think of our little hideaway?"
"I'd guessed as much".
"Despite appearances, they're siblings. They all share the will to survive. It's built into each cell, each limb. That was the great breakthrough. It gave the creatures a purpose but it's the cause of the instability problem we're having. You've signed Act 54, haven't you" I nodded. "Well, there's no harm in you knowing that we've had some trouble. If a lower unit breaks out of this hierarchical order of survival it views the rest of the body as a threat. In such cases we're trying to get the surrounding tissue to regress, devolve until stability is re-established. It seems the safest approach, but we're hitting some fundamental problems. You see, some cell components were originally self- replicating viruses that got into symbiosis with others. Now sometimes, and we don't yet know why, this mutuality breaks down and the whole organism suffers."
"Like cancer."
"Exactly." He held out his arm to the creature who gripped it as a baby would a finger. "Amazing really, that this frankenstein throwaway could lead towards an understanding of the mechanism."
I watched it climb onto Khan's shoulder. "What's it called?" I asked.
"It's long John's plaything, Polly. He was working on speech and decided to try out five throat designs at once. It can repeat anything you say to it in Urdu, Sanskrit, the lot. All 1600 languages of mother India. And it doesn't understand a word".
"How far have you got with intelligence? My program has a cluster of intelligence parameters. I've had to make assumptions."
"No lab in the world has improved on nature. Polly has cut-down chimps' brains and can use symbols. We use common objects with her instead of words. The trouble is that she can't see a banana, say, as simultaneously a symbol and a banana. We could train her to see a bowl of fruit as a sentence but even if she was starving, she'd watch it till it rots. There's no poetry there, no hunger for the beauty of the symbols. If we could get hold of some human embryos we might get somewhere but the genotype could be traced back to the parents through the Interpol database. The risk's too great. Reading between the lines of some theses it looks as if people have researched by doing illegal experiments then have performed an unlikely but legal experiment to publicly justify their findings. There have been just too many lucky breaks for my liking. Who cares, anyway? Biochips are far more promising. That's your baby I guess. Even there the Japs have a headstart on us with their Shintoism, their reverence for objects as well as beings. Enough talk. I'm sounding like Jacobs." He put Polly down. She scuttled behind a pile of books. "How's the program? I hear you've made excellent progress."
I noted the touch of condescention in his voice. "It needs goofproofing round the edges but I've done some trial runs. Initially it looked OK then some anomalies arose. I traced the problem to a chemistry library routine."
"Dealing with cell membrane permiability?"
"Yes. There must be a bug somewhere but I can't trace it. After a while an imbalance of sodium ions trips a cascade and the cell goes into unrestrained mitosis. There's also some necrosis. Anyway, how did you know?"
"There's nothing wrong with the routine itself. It's us, Joe, we're only human. We still have to leave all the real work to nature. Maybe our approach is wrong. When a scientist opens a door, he twists the knob so hard it comes off in his hand. It's our western education."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Besides, it won't last much longer, the animals are already showing signs of decay. When we heard about your work we knew you'd find out. With fridges it's called built-in redundancy." He moved around the lab agitatedly, looking for something to tidy up.
"Jacobs was talking about a catalyst problem", I said, acting the straight man.
"That fool know's nothing. The animals just don't know who they are. Like India." He picked Polly up and put it into a cage. "The nervous system doesn't connect the parts up till after surgery. It's too late by then." He walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. "This is what you'll have to do, Joe, when we've disbanded. Destroy all this. The animals, everything."
There was an intensity about him that I hadn't seen before. "Why don't you?" I said.
"We made them. And destroy your bloody program too."
"Hold on, why-"
"I said destroy everything! We should've started from scratch, not built upon what went before. We have bullock carts to carry fridges, loudspeakers to call the muslims to prayer and our people still die in the streets while we man this showcase. It mustn't go on." He took some deep breaths to calm himself. "We're all in it together but lab 4 is worst. Professional arrogance is bad enough but we tried to defy brahma. I wanted to recall all our products but the others outvoted me; they wanted the grants. It's all so sworded. Hey look, come round this evening if you want to know more, I wouldn't mind the company. I don't feel too good right now. You could clear your buffers with some of my brandy". He put his arm around me. I smelt the garlic on his breath, the rancid ghee.
"I'd like to, but my mother's not too well. Menopause probably. I'm thinking of going back to stay with my parents for a while. Dad's phoning this evening with the latest news."
The same seat on the same homeward Maglev. I visit every weekend now. A different girl, the same sibilence. I get up suddenly, seeing the toilet vacated. Two holes are in the wall where the soap dispenser has been pulled off. Vandalism has spread even to here. Someone has made a face from it, adding a smiling mouth.
Jacobs assures me that my mother's brain tumor was not caused by Haliz and that I'm trying to blame myself for something that wasn't my fault. Coincidences, he says, are the result of lazy thinking. Why should I listen to him? Once I believed Khan. The lab 4 group no longer humor him now that he's in an asylum.
Father is at the door to greet me. We have never been very close, he and I. He is inconsolable. In the last few days of delirium she has said much that hurt him cruelly. "She doesn't know what she's saying", I tell him.
"Man shouldn't play around with the spirit", he replies. I tell him that the mind is as much a delusion of Maya as the body. He disagrees. He is a brahmin. More English than the English. I have never seen him so angry. He cries, apologises.
She often goes back to the early years of their marriage, by the Ganges. She doesn't recognise me because I wasn't born then. Sometimes she sits bolt upright, looks beadily around and puts a finger to her lips, bidding silence. Then she starts laughing.
Perhaps she will recover. Hers is only an organic disease. We can afford to give her the best treatment. We have learnt not to expect gratitude; she doesn't understand pain, but we must keep trying.
Jacobs was right after all. Together we have sorted out the catalysis difficulty. The centre has a world patent and I have an algorithm named after me. When I've finished I will move into biochips. India can catch up, it always will. Perhaps I'll look for a wife too; an arranged marriage if all else fails.
Father refuses to have Haliz in the house. I will return it to the lab. He wants her destroyed but this is India. Here everything is recycled, even souls.