Descent (22 page)

I forbore, too, to mention something else in this connection, which had been on my mind for some time.

Gabrielle was now a postgrad at the Stem Cell Centre in Edinburgh’s BioQuarter; I’d had a string of freelance gigs for science websites. The BioQuarter’s energetic biomedicine PR person, Nicola, had her desk in the centre, from which she sent out a steady stream of intriguing snippets about the latest developments. Naturally, I grabbed every opportunity to interview her or pump her for information, partly because she was a good source, but mainly in order to drop by at Gabrielle’s desk and have a coffee and chat on the way out. Nicola and I got on well, and I often managed to wheedle out of her some telling detail or curious anecdote that wasn’t in the official release. One morning in June, Nicola had trailed the scent of some infertility testing breakthrough, and I’d duly turned up to check it out.

‘Hi,’ Nicola said, as I put my head round the side of the door of the open-plan office where she worked. She stood up, swept a sheaf of papers and a phone from her metre of desk space, and nodded sideways. ‘Coffee?’

I followed her past a couple of proper office doors and into a wide corner with non-glass walls lined with drink and snack machines, and containing a dozen high and low tables interspersed with barstools, random sofas and strategic beanbags. Nicola led the way to a small round table not occupied by a huddle of researchers, left me staking a claim on it, and returned with a couple of steaming plastic cups.

‘Thanks,’ I said, sipping black coffee. She knew my tastes. We made small talk for a couple of minutes – weather, traffic – then Nicola shuffled her pack and got down to business.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Very nice development, just out of clinical trials. A non-invasive fertility testing kit. It’s a synthetic biology package, with computational properties. You swallow it, it passes through the urinary tract and picks up molecular markers from the sperm and ova, and if your pee turns blue the next day you don’t have any obvious fertility problems.’

‘What’s the advantage? I mean, don’t we already have tests?’

‘Yes, but tests involve hassle, and embarrassment, and … anyway, this will have some uptake. Especially with all the new fertility issues.’

‘What new issues?’

Nicola sat back. ‘Well, here’s one. This is in the technical literature, but for, uh, reasons best known to themselves the researchers aren’t too keen on its becoming widely discussed among the general public. At least, not until they’ve got a line worked out.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘That sounds like a story in itself.’

‘No, seriously. If I tell you, it’ll have to be deep background and off the record. If I catch you mentioning it – no more stories from me.’

She sounded serious.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Deal.’

She mimed shaking on it. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Well, one of the interesting issues is that some patients are presenting who on all tests seem to be fertile individually, but not with each other. And it turns out – sometimes through various infidelities and divorces and sometimes through consensual arrangements like sperm donation and so forth – that they really are fertile. And the speculation is that some kind of speciation event has taken place without anyone noticing.’

I felt a chill. Speciation. Fuck me.

‘How could that happen?’ I asked. ‘I mean, has it ever been observed in other species?’

‘Oh, sure. It was first discovered decades ago in mice when it turned out that certain pairs were infertile with each other but fertile with other partners. What had seemed to be one species – what had always been thought to be one species because they were always found together in the same places and niches and so on – turned out to be two. And something like that may have happened in humans.’

‘Now, wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Mice have, what, how many generations a year? Four? Whereas humans—’

‘Yes, it’s a theoretical problem,’ she said. ‘There certainly haven’t been genetically isolated human populations since …’ She shrugged. ‘The Neanderthals, maybe?’ She didn’t see me flinch. ‘And they seem to have bred back into the mainstream, as we know. It might be something stochastic – a train of chance events – rather than the sort of reproductive isolation we see in animal populations. But whatever the reasons, it is happening.’

‘So the human species is speciating,’ I said. ‘Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water …’

‘What do you mean?’ she asked, frowning.

‘Just when the whole idea of race is finally just about totally discredited, it turns out there are other actual species hiding inside the human race! Jeez, imagine what someone irresponsible and opportunistic could make of that.’

‘I see how that could be a problem, that’s why I think it’s kept quiet, but I don’t see how it could be used that way,’ Nicola said. ‘There are no obvious physical markers, nor even subtle ones; it’s invisible.’

‘But they can be found, can’t they, with genetic databases?’

‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘That’s how people get genetic counselling; people can even look themselves up, see if they’re compatible …’

I stared. ‘People do this already? This is a thing?’

‘Oh yes. Of course it’s not advertised that way, maybe because of that very issue. Just as a personal genetic compatibility prediction.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Hmm. Yes, that should make the fertility kits a story of wider interest than I thought.’

‘Indeed,’ said Nicola, pleased at her work. ‘That speciation speculation, though … uh, like I said, deep background and off the record.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

I didn’t even mention it to Gabrielle. But every so often, I worried about it.

Back in Kirkwall, we queued for fish and chips, listened to an astronomer in the Peedie Kirk Hall, then repaired to the Reel for local beer, shots of Highland Park, and a clarsach and accordion and an old man’s long, strong voice. We fell in with a table of geologists, who talked about stormy weather and the vanished sea of Orkady. That night we slept well in our tent.

In the morning I woke to sunlight stitch-sifted in strings of bright dots, and lay a while before stirring. Yesterday I and Gabrielle had seen a flying object, very much identified, public, known, that matched my long-ago UFO encounter in every respect but size. My hardly original speculation that what Calum and I had seen was some application of advanced secret military technology seemed vindicated. Even the connection with British Avionic Systems, my Man in Black’s former employer, was now confirmed. I’d read the excitable tech-press anticipations of this development over the past couple of years, but BAS had kept the thing under wraps until yesterday’s test flight. No doubt today’s news would be full of it.

I could have looked that up, by rolling over and reaching for my phone. I could have phoned or texted Calum. But I didn’t want to. I might get offered a commission to write something about the BAS breakthrough. If I did, I knew I’d pass it up, making some excuse about pressure of other work or lack of expertise (neither of which had ever stopped me writing articles). I even had some expertise, and a continuing low-level interest in UFOs. But the very thought of thinking, writing or talking about the floating silvery globe filled me with dread. As I lay there in Gabrielle’s warmth, I tried to understand why.

Gabrielle shifted, stretched, woke. A sleepy smile, a stroking hand.

‘Sleep well?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Oh yes.’

Somewhere in that brief, phatic exchange, the answer came to me: I wanted to go on sleeping well. I didn’t want the dreams to come back.

At Birsay we missed the low tide, and had to be content with a stroll along the shore, where tilted sandstone strata displayed three million years to a single glance, like the riffled pages of an old book. There was a van selling instant coffee, weak and too hot. Then we went to Maes Howe, and in the stone dome followed the guide’s words around the walls, peering at inscriptions and Viking graffiti. Stooping in a long tunnel and out into the light, through a stone door whose ton weight had once pivoted to the push of a child’s hand.

It was our third September. We were in Orkney for its forty-oddth Science Festival. Out in the Sound the tidal turbines turned. High on the headlands the windmills spun. Lights were on and music was loud. Kirkwall’s streets thronged with visitors. Its pubs and halls rang with talk of the New Improvement. Accommodation was nowhere to be had, though we were both on the Festival’s programme: Gabrielle taking part in a roundtable on stem cell work, I giving a mid-evening slide-show on – of all things – flying saucers. But we were very minor players: Gabrielle had been chosen as a shining example of what a young researcher could accomplish, and my presence was the almost accidental result of my Sceptics in the Pub evenings at university being remembered by a former fellow student who’d since gone on to great things in the burgeoning sci-com racket. He’d been roped into the festival’s organisation, and had a sudden slot to fill due to a bizarre tea-pouring accident that had befallen the scheduled speaker from the
Fortean Times
.

So we didn’t have a room in a hotel or a rented house like the big name speakers did. We had our tent, on a campsite just outside Kirkwall. In that tent, on the night before the fourth day of the festival, I asked Gabrielle to marry me.

She looked at me across the pillow, in the glow of a cold light.

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling, then raised a finger. ‘If …’

‘If what?’

‘If I get pregnant.’

I stared at her. ‘You want kids?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

I thought about it. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Well then.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘It’s a deal. Is it a deal?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She grasped my hand, inside the big sleeping bag. ‘It used to be called handfasting.’

‘Handfasted,’ I said, gripping back. ‘I like that. So … when do you want to start?’

‘Now is good,’ she said.

And it was, but later that night I woke up and found myself stricken with doubt. I was delighted that Gabrielle had agreed to marry me, but to make this conditional on her getting pregnant took some of the shine off it. The proposal seemed instrumental and somehow calculating. I wondered if she knew of the research Nicola had told me about, and was making some canny advance provision. And yet … and yet … wasn’t she just being honest with me? She wasn’t making our relationship conditional on her becoming pregnant, just its legal affirmation. In that light her precondition seemed reasonable enough, even loving – seeking her own advantage to be sure, but suggesting at the same time that what we already had was strong enough not to need formalising.

On the other hand … and so it went, a long and inconclusive debate in my head, until edges and seams of the tent brightened, and I fell into a sweaty, uneasy, ill-timed sleep. Over breakfast in a café in the morning we kept laughing and looking at each other and grinning and reconfirming to each other that it hadn’t all been a dream. We walked hand in hand around Kirkwall and I totally surprised Gabrielle by marching into a craft jewellery shop and buying her an engagement ring. As soon as she’d put it on her finger and got her thanks and a big kiss out of the way, she opened out her phone and made a big deal of bookmarking a slew of bridal sites.

‘We can save a bit of money on all that,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘Well, you already
have
the big white dress …’

‘Don’t,’ she warned, ‘even
think
about saying that again, or it’s all off even if it turns out I’m having
triplets
.’

‘Just teasing,’ I said.

‘I’m not. No way am I going to be anyone’s little fairy princess ever again.’ She mimed a shudder, then thumbed. ‘Hmm, that’s more like it …’

She pointed to an ivory outfit of slinky trousers and a flared peplum jacket.

‘Now that,’ I said, hardly able to breathe, ‘is a look.’

In my memory that September week in Orkney had more days of sunshine and evenings of song and nights of sex than any objective recording could confirm. I remember it as the last of our good times, not because it really was – we had good times after it, and I do remember them. But they’re not what you want to hear about now, are they?

I got off the bus just after ten in an April downpour and walked through the long corridor between the front and the back of the hospital that everyone still calls the New Royal. For a few tens of metres from the front entrance there’s a display on each side of blown-up, grainy photos and engravings of heroes and heroines of medical history, linked by a once trendy timeline in coded colours. Further on, the corridor widens to a waiting area that’s more like a small shopping mall, then narrows again to medical-institutional functionality and opens through glass doors at the far end to the car park at the back.

On the hillside behind the car park, a few hundred metres away by a path across a stream, rises the new BioQuarter. At that time there were six buildings, all newer than the hospital, two of them built in the previous two years. The Stem Cell Centre, where Gabrielle worked and studied, looks like a scale model of that giant glass cube from outer space in which Revelation, as Baxter pointed out to me on his first visit, promises the righteous a happy eternity.

I swiped my card at the barrier in the lobby, nodded to the receptionist, and waited for the lift, gazing idly up at the slowly rotating suspended double-helix stained-glass mobile that filled the atrium at second, third and fourth floor levels. I’d always thought it spectacular but unimaginative. Not that I could think of an alternative, but that wasn’t my job. It was the job of some artistic director who hadn’t (in my jaded opinion) done it right.

The lift took me to the third floor, where the labs and offices were – the lower two floors housed the building’s machinery and stores. I followed the colour-coded carpet to Nicola’s place in the open-plan offices of the floor’s outer section, which surrounded the glass-walled inner core that contained the labs. (Maintaining this arrangement as anything but a greenhouse accounts, I guess, for a big part of the ground floor’s being entirely turned over to machinery, though the air-conditioning’s solar power makes it less inefficient than it sounds.)