Perfect People (9 page)

Global warming was to blame for the whole world’s weather patterns being out of kilter – that was the considered opinion. Scientists messing with nature were to blame. Scientists were becoming the new heretics. First the bomb, then pollution, then GM food. And next? Designer babies?

Fear pounded inside her.

OK, good. Congratulations. You’re going to have a girl.

If he couldn’t get that right – Dettore, Dr Dettore (
call me Leo!
) – if he couldn’t get that one absolute fundamental right, then . . . ?

Oh God, what have we done?

John drove the grimy grey Volvo out of the car park and made a left, followed by another left, then stopped in a queue at the lights of the junction with La Cienega. He indicated right. South.

Naomi pulled her iPhone out of her handbag and quickly glanced through her afternoon schedule. She’d gone straight from Oliver Stone’s company to a six-week assignment for a company called Bright Spark Productions, which had made a documentary series about young filmmakers. The first show was going out on the Bravo channel in two weeks’ time.

At two-thirty she had a meeting at UCLA film school. It was now twenty past twelve. Her car was at home, but she needed to go via the office to pick up some material. A twenty-five-minute drive, if the traffic wasn’t too bad. She needed about half an hour there to put some stuff together. Then allow thirty minutes to the film school. Not much of a margin left; she hated to be late when she was working.

‘What an asshole that guy is!’ John said angrily, finally breaking the long silence between them since they had left Dr Rosengarten’s office. ‘What a total fucking asshole.’

Naomi said nothing. At five she was meant to be having a drink at the Four Seasons with a journalist friend who worked for
Variety
. She couldn’t cancel, but how the hell was she going to get through the afternoon? She lowered her window. The gust of air, even laden with petrol fumes, felt good, better than the smell of the interior, of warm, old plastic. John inched forward. A tractor-trailer rumbled past them.

His cellphone rang. She was grateful that he killed the call. Moments later her own phone rang. She switched it off, with a tinge of guilt, knowing it was probably someone from the office but not able to deal with a work conversation at this moment.

‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said, finally.

‘He’s wrong.’ John tramped the gas pedal, making a more violent turn than he had intended, pulling out inches in front of a bus, which blasted its horn in anger.

‘He
has
to be wrong,’ she agreed.

‘No one can know for sure at twelve weeks,’ he said. ‘It was dumb of him to claim he could.’

‘He’s arrogant. He doesn’t care about us, we’re little people. If you or I were A-list celebs, he wouldn’t have made that mistake. He wouldn’t have dared.’

The bus filled John’s rear-view mirror as they crossed San Vincente and Wilshire. ‘His mind wasn’t on it.’

‘We should get a second opinion.’

John negotiated the junction with Olympic in silence, then he said, ‘We’ll get one. He’s an asshole, he’s made a mistake. Sixteen weeks is the earliest you can tell, all the books say that. We’ll go and see someone again when you are sixteen weeks.’

‘I don’t want to wait four weeks – I can’t wait that long, John, I
have
to know.
We
have to know.’

‘There’s stuff on the net about a blood test called free foetal DNA, but I’m not sure how reliable it is. It may not be possible – to be totally accurate – until sixteen weeks. I don’t think we should panic.’

‘I’m worried,’ Naomi said. ‘If the sex is wrong, the other genes might also be wrong. There must be some one hundred per cent accurate way we can check on the sex without waiting a month. Surely? What about a DNA test – wouldn’t that be a possibility?’

‘Other than this free foetal method, it’s invasive to do that. I looked up a load of stuff on the web the other day about testing foetuses. There’s a risk of miscarriage. It’s a small risk, but – do you want to take any chances?’

Did she? Any chances? She tried desperately to think straight. If Rosengarten had made a mistake, it would be crazy to risk everything by panicking. But—

‘If it comes to it, we’ll fly back to the clinic. Confront Dettore.’

‘You think Dettore would tell us the truth? You think if he’s made a mistake he’s going to admit it to us?’

John started to say something, then fell silent for some moments. Then he said, ‘He – he doesn’t have any reason—’

Swallowing back a knot of fear in her throat, she said, ‘Reason to what?’

‘To give us a girl when we’ve asked for a boy.’

‘Phone him,’ she said. ‘You have his number, phone him now.’

They were less than half a mile from home, but John pulled off the road onto the forecourt of the small shopping mall. He looked up the number on his BlackBerry then, holding the phone to his ear, dialled.

Naomi watched his face. After some moments, he said, ‘This is John Klaesson. I need to speak to Dr Dettore very urgently. Please ask him to call me back on my cellphone.’ He gave the number, then he hung up.

‘Voice mail?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ John looked at his watch. ‘They’re on East Coast time – which means they’re three hours ahead. It’s twenty after twelve. Twenty after three on the ship. Maybe there’s some problem with the switchboard. I had this difficulty getting hold of him a few times in the past.’

‘I didn’t see any switchboard on the ship, John.’

He wedged the phone back into the cradle. ‘There’s a lot of things we didn’t see.’

She said nothing.

When he was eighteen, John had to make a decision that would shape the course of his life. He had already decided he wanted to make a career in academic research, but had a hard time deciding which field. He was torn between his love of biology and his fascination with mathematics, physics and technology.

There was something mystical to him about all mathematical problems. Sometimes he felt he was reaching out through time into some new, as yet undiscovered dimension, to meet an intellectual challenge placed by a vastly superior intelligence. As if each of these big problems was part of some cosmic puzzle, and if you could solve them, you would understand the key to human existence.

In biology, also, were keys to the riddle of existence, but they were more limited. The world of genetics excited him, but ultimately genetics boiled down to mechanics. It seemed to him that genetics could help you understand everything about a human being, except for the one key question that had fascinated John all his life: why do we exist? Ultimately he found biologists too narrow in their thinking. Relatively few biologists believed either in the notion of God or any higher form of intelligence. He found far broader thinking among mathematicians and physicists, and that was ultimately the reason he opted to study computer sciences.

But when he began at Uppsala, Sweden’s premier university, he hadn’t realized that, despite the exploding technology revolution, life for most academic researchers was not changing, and that when he went out into the real world afterwards, he would be faced with a constant struggle for funding. If you weren’t employed by a corporation or an institute, the research programme you were on would likely have funding for a limited period, often as short as just three years. This effectively meant that instead of concentrating on your research, you had to put a huge amount of energy into writing letters to companies, institutes, foundations, and filling in applications, trying to find your next tranche of funding.

This was where John was at again now. He’d stayed on at Uppsala doing his PhD, then as a postdoc, but ultimately found Sweden too limiting – as well as disliking the short daylight hours of winter there. At the age of twenty-six he had jumped at the opportunity to relocate to Sussex University in England, to a lecturing post that gave him the opportunity to work in a lab as part of a research team in cognitive sciences. It was headed by a man he considered to be a real visionary, Professor Carson Dicks, under whom he had worked when the scientist had spent a year as a visiting lecturer at Uppsala.

John enjoyed the science they were doing at Sussex and working under Carson Dicks so much, he didn’t mind that the pay was poor, but he was depressed by the indifferent attitude in Britain towards research. Then, after three years, Dicks left the university to take a post at a government research establishment. Shortly after, at the age of twenty-nine, John was offered the chance of a tenure track faculty lecturing post at the University of Southern California, with his own lab in a department headed by Dr Bruce Katzenberg – another scientist whose work he admired hugely. He jumped at it.

John’s work at USC involved the creation and study of virtual life forms – something that married his interests in both physics and biology, and was a dream project for him. After six years he was now up for tenure – something that would have been a certainty for him had Dr Katzenberg still been head of his department.

But a year ago, Dr Katzenberg was headhunted by a software company in Silicon Valley, which made him an offer he apologetically told John that not even God could have refused. Now, with less than a year of the project to run, the prospect of further funds did not look good, and nor did the likelihood of tenure for many of his colleagues on the project, who were starting to file applications elsewhere.

John had been brought up in Örebro, a small, beautiful university town in the centre of Sweden that was built around the banks of a river, and had a moated medieval castle in its centre. In summer he’d cycled through a park to school, and in winter when there was thick snow he’d skied there. He liked to walk, he liked open spaces, feeling free. In LA he sometimes felt hemmed in.

Even more than Naomi did, he missed the big changes in the seasons. He loved the long hours of daylight, and the summers were great, but he really hankered at times for the cold sharp tang of autumn and the sense of the approach of winter. And he missed the snow most of all. Sure, they could drive to the mountains and go skiing at weekends, or take a short, cheap flight to Telluride or Park City or any of a whole bunch of great ski resorts, but he missed that snow falling outside the windows, covering the garden and the cars. He missed the spring. He missed the sense of community.

Perhaps it was the same in any large city.

He turned off Jefferson into Gate 8, nodded at the attendant in his booth and pulled into a parking bay. Then, hitching his laptop bag over his shoulder, he walked back onto Jefferson, and crossed McClintock, a short distance from the Shrine. This area was fine in daytime, but at night students and staff either walked in a large group, or got escorted by a security guard back to the parking lots. It was that kind of a neighbourhood.

The dark and violent underbelly of the city had, mercifully, never touched either him or Naomi and he rarely gave it any thought. It was the constant reminders of Halley all around, everywhere in the city, that affected both of them. Santa Monica was the worst. For the best part of a year, St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica had become a second home for them. He and Naomi had taken turns at sleeping on a cot in Halley’s room. Watching him deteriorate. Hoping for some miracle that was never going to happen.

Sometimes, even just hearing the name
Santa Monica
brought pain. He had hoped that would change when Luke was born, that they could start living their lives forwards again, instead of always being in the shadow of the past. But now, with Dr Rosengarten’s pronouncement, even their hopes for a new beginning were in a mess.

Christ, what the hell have I got us into?

Deep in thought, he entered the four-storey building and took the elevator up to the third floor, where the department of cognitive sciences was housed. Several students were milling around in the corridor as he emerged, familiar faces, but only a couple he could put a name to. It was lunch time. Ordinarily he’d be taking a break now, instead of arriving to start his day.

A pretty Chinese-American girl suddenly blocked his path. ‘Hey, Dr Klaesson – could I talk to you for a moment? I have a real problem with something you said in your lecture last Thursday about Neural Darwinism, and I need to—’

‘Could we do this later, Mei-Ling?’

‘Sure – shall I stop by your office?’

‘About four – would that work for you?’ He had no idea of his schedule this afternoon, but he just didn’t want to talk to anyone right now. He needed some time alone.

To think.

To get hold of Dr Leo Dettore.

‘Four’s good,’ she said.

‘Terrific.’ He walked on, down a shiny linoleum corridor lined on one side with grey metal filing cabinets and on the other with closed doors.

The last door on the left opened onto a room of ten computer workstations, four of which were occupied by some of his graduate and postdoctoral fellows. One was sitting back, semi-comatose, a can of Coke in his hand. Another was hunched over the screen in deep contemplation. His young postdoc, Sarah Neri, her head a mass of tangled red hair, had her face inches from her screen, studying some graph. John tiptoed past into the sanctuary of his office, and closed the door behind him.