White Teeth

garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. In the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly if one was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was; if one was a little old, with eccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speech to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous.

‘No, not an interrogation. I was just thinking of reading it myself, you see. I heard it was quite good, you know. And I was wondering why you thought it was weird.’

The girl, deciding at that moment that Marcus was neither mass murderer nor rapist, let her muscles relax and slid back in her chair. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Not so much weird, I guess, more scary.’

‘Scary how?’

‘Well, it’s scary isn’t it, all this genetic engineering.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yeah, you know, messing about with the body. They reckon there’s a gene for intelligence, sexuality – practically everything, you know? Recombinant DNA technology,’ said the girl, using the term cautiously, as if testing the water to see how much Marcus knew. Seeing no recognition in his face, she continued with more confidence. ‘Once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular, like, bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo. That’s what they’re doing to those poor mice. It’s pretty fucking scary. Not to mention, like, the pathogenic, i.e., disease-producing, organisms they’ve got sitting in petri dishes all over the place. I mean, I’m a politics student, yeah, and I’m like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out? You’ve got to be seriously naive if you don’t think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the Arabs. Quick way to deal with the fundamentalist Muslims – no, seriously, man,’ said the girl in response to a raised eyebrow from Marcus, ‘things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit you just realize how close science is to science fiction.’

As far as Marcus could see, science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passing each other in the fog. A science fiction robot, for example – even his son Oscar’s expectation of a robot – was a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yet achieve. While the robots in Oscar’s mind were singing, dancing and empathizing with his every joy and fear, over at MIT some poor bastard was slowly and painstakingly trying to get a machine to re-create the movements of a single human thumb. On the flip side of the coin, the simplest biological facts, the structure of animal cells for instance, were a mystery to all but fourteen-year-old children and scientists like himself; the former spending their time drawing them in class, the latter injecting them with foreign DNA. In between, or so it appeared to Marcus, flowed a great ocean of idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuous novelists, animal-rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalists who professed strange objections to his life’s work. In the past few months, since his FutureMouse had gained some public attention, he had been forced to believe in these people, believe they actually existed en masse, and this was as hard for him as being taken to the bottom of the garden and told that here lived fairies.

‘I mean, they talk about progress,’ said the girl shrilly, becoming somewhat excited. ‘They talk about leaps and bounds in the field of medicine yada yada yada, but bottom line, if somebody knows how to eliminate “undesirable” qualities in people, do you think some government’s not going to do it? I mean, what’s undesirable? There’s just something a little fascist about the whole deal… I guess it’s a good book, but at points you do think: where are we going here? Millions of blonds with blue eyes? Mail order babies? I mean, if you’re Indian like me you’ve got something to worry about, yeah? And then they’re planting cancers in poor creatures; like, who are you to mess with the make-up of a mouse? Actually creating an animal just so it can die – it’s like being God! I mean personally I’m a Hindu, yeah? I’m not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when it’s going to have kids, when it’s going to die. It’s just unnatural.’

Marcus nodded and tried to disguise his exhaustion. It was exhausting just to listen to her. Nowhere in the book did Marcus even touch upon human eugenics – it wasn’t his field, and he had no particular interest in it. And yet this girl had managed to read a book almost entirely concerned with the more prosaic developments in recombinant DNA – gene therapy, proteins to dissolve blood clots, the cloning of insulin – and emerge from it full of the usual neo-fascist tabloid fantasies – mindless human clones, genetic policing of sexual and racial characteristics, mutated diseases, etc. Only the chapter on his mouse could have prompted such an hysterical reaction. It was to his mouse that the title of the book referred (again, the agent’s idea), and it was his mouse upon which media attention had landed. Marcus saw clearly now what he had previously only suspected, that if it were not for the mouse there would have been little interest in the book at all. No other work he had been involved with seemed to catch the public imagination like his mice. To determine a mouse’s future stirred people up. Precisely because people saw it that way: it wasn’t determining the future of a cancer, or a reproductive cycle, or the capacity to age. It was determining the future of the mouse. People focused on the mouse in a manner that never failed to surprise him. They seemed unable to think of the animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality. The mouseness of the mouse seemed inescapable. A picture from Marcus’s laboratory of one of his transgenic mice, along with an article about the struggle for a patent, had appeared in The Times. Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St Agnes’s Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews. Neena Begum phoned to inform him that he would be reincarnated as a cockroach. Glenard Oak, always acute to a turning media tide, retracted their invitation for Marcus to come to school during National Science week. His own son, his Joshua, still refused to speak to him. The insanity of all of it genuinely shook him. The fear he had unwittingly provoked. And all because the public were three steps ahead of him like Oscar’s robot, they had already played out their endgames, already concluded what the result of his research would be – something he did not presume to imagine! – full of their clones, zombies, designer children, gay genes. Of course, he understood the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg’s hands? What can you hope to achieve?

‘But surely,’ Marcus began, more rattled than he expected himself to be, ‘surely that’s rather the point. All animals are in a sense programmed to die. It’s perfectly natural. If it appears random, that’s only because we don’t clearly understand it, you see. We don’t properly understand why some people seem predisposed to cancer. We don’t properly understand why some people die of natural causes at sixty-three and some at ninety-seven. Surely it would be interesting to know a little more about these things. Surely the point of something like an oncomouse is that we’re given the opportunity to see a life and a death stage by stage under the micro-’

‘Yeah, well,’ said the girl, putting the book in her bag. ‘What- ever. I’ve got to get to gate 52. It was nice talking to you. But yeah, you should definitely give it a read. I’m a big fan of Surrey T. Banks… he writes some freaky shit.’

Marcus watched the girl and her bouncing ponytail progress down the wide walkway until she merged with other dark-haired girls and was lost. Instantly, he felt relieved and remembered with pleasure his own appointment with gate 32 and Magid Iqbal, who was a different kettle of fish, or a blacker kettle, or whatever the phrase was. With fifteen minutes to spare, he abandoned his coffee which had gone rapidly from scalding to lukewarm, and began to walk in the direction of the lower 50s. The phrase ‘a meeting of minds’ was running through his head. He knew this was an absurd thing to think of a seventeen-year-old boy, but still he thought it, felt it: a certain elation, maybe equal to the feeling his own mentor experienced when the seventeen-year-old Marcus Chalfen first walked into his poky college office. A certain satisfaction. Marcus was familiar with the mutually beneficial smugness that runs from mentor to protege and back again (ah, but you are brilliant and deign to spend your time with me! Ah, but I am brilliant and catch your attention above all others!). Still, he indulged himself. And he was glad to be meeting Magid for the first time, alone, though he hoped he was not guilty of planning it that way. It was more a series of fortunate accidents. The Iqbals’ car had broken down, and Marcus’s hatchback was not large. He had persuaded Samad and Alsana that there would not be enough room for Magid’s luggage if they came with him. Millat was in Chester with KEVIN and had been quoted as saying