Perfect People

  ‘Do you want lunch?’ Naomi asked.

  John shook his head. He wasn’t hungry, but it wasn’t to do with the motion of the ship; it was the stress of worrying constantly about doing the right thing. Making the right decisions.

  ‘Me neither. Why don’t we sit out for a bit – it’s warm enough to sunbathe,’ Naomi said. ‘And have a swim? And try to talk this compassion thing through?’

  ‘Sure.’

  A few minutes later, swathed in the clinic’s white towelling dressing gowns and daubed in suntan lotion, they made their way back outside and around to the stern. Naomi gripped the handrail to walk down to the pool deck, then stopped suddenly and turned to John.

  George and Angelina were lying on loungers by the otherwise deserted pool. Tanned and beautiful, in sharp swimsuits and cool sunglasses, they were both reading paperbacks.

  Moments later Naomi heard a click. Her eyes shot back to John, who was surreptitiously jamming something into his dressing-gown pocket.

  ‘You didn’t take a photograph?’

  He winked.

  ‘That’s bad. You shouldn’t, you know the rules. We could get thrown off if you—’

  ‘I shot from the hip. Nobody saw.’

  ‘Please don’t take any more.’

  They walked over to a couple of loungers near them. ‘Hi!’ John boomed cheerily. ‘Good afternoon!’

  For some moments there was no reaction at all from either of them. Then, very slowly, the man they had nicknamed George lowered his paperback a few inches, then, equally slowly, he inclined his head a fraction, as if to confirm the source of the greeting. His expression did not change and he returned to his book, giving them no further acknowledgement. The woman did not move a muscle.

  Naomi shrugged at John. He opened his mouth as if to say something further, then, appearing to think better of it, peeled off his dressing gown, went to the edge of the pool and dipped a foot in.

  Naomi joined him. ‘Friendly, aren’t they?’ she hissed.

  ‘Maybe they’re deaf.’

  She sniggered. John climbed down into the water and began to swim.

  ‘How’s the water?’ she asked.

  ‘Like a sauna!’

  Naomi tested it gingerly with her foot, remembering that John was used to freezing lakes in Sweden. His idea of warm was anything that didn’t have ice floating in it.

  Ten minutes later, when they emerged, George and Angelina had gone.

  Naomi lay on her lounger, pushing her hair back and wringing out the water, letting the heat of the sun and the warm air dry her body. ‘I think that was incredibly rude,’ she said.

  Towelling his head, John said, ‘Maybe Dettore should insert a politeness gene into their child.’ Then, sitting down on the edge of Naomi’s chair, he said, ‘OK, we need to get our heads around compassion – we have to get it resolved by three o’clock – that gives us an hour and a half.’ He stroked her leg, then ducked his head down impulsively and kissed her shin. ‘You haven’t sucked my toes for a long time – remember you used to do that?’

  ‘You used to suck mine, too,’ she grinned.

  ‘We’re getting too middle-aged!’

  Then, looking at him a little wistfully, she asked, ‘Do you still fancy me as much as you used to?’

  Caressing her navel suggestively, John said, ‘More. It’s the truth. I love the way you look, the way you smell, the way you feel when I’m holding you. When I’m apart from you, if I just think about you I get horny.’

  She lifted his hand and kissed each of his fingers in turn. ‘I feel the same about you, too. It just gets better with you all the time.’

  ‘Let’s concentrate,’ he said. ‘Compassion.’

  ‘And the sensitivity part as well,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ve just been thinking in the pool—’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  Dettore had this morning presented them with modifications that could be made to the group of genes responsible for compassion and sensitivity. John saw compassion as a mathematical equation. You had to find the balance between where compassion was a crucial part of your humanity and where, through excess, it could threaten your survival. He told Dettore it was a dangerous area to try to change. The geneticist had disagreed strongly.

  Composing her thoughts carefully, Naomi said, ‘If you and another soldier were travelling through a jungle, being pursued by an enemy, and your buddy was wounded suddenly, too badly to carry on walking, what would you do?’

  ‘I’d carry him.’

  ‘Right. But you wouldn’t be able to carry him very far, so then what do you do? If you leave him, the enemy will capture him and kill him. If you stay with him the enemy will kill both of you.’

  John craved a cigarette suddenly. He’d quit when Naomi quit, after she fell pregnant with Halley, then had taken it up again for a short time after Halley died. He hadn’t had one now for eighteen months, but whenever he felt stressed, that was when he really wanted one.

  ‘The Darwinian solution, I suppose, would be to leave my friend and continue,’ he replied.

  ‘Isn’t the whole point of this, our whole reason for being here, to take charge of the future of our child ourselves – to not let him be a prisoner of haphazard random selection? If we did agree, God forbid, to messing around with his brain genes – as Dr Dettore keeps encouraging us – and we succeeded in designing a smarter human being, wouldn’t he be better at problem-solving than we are? Wouldn’t he know the answer to this?’

  ‘We’re trying to make a healthier person who will have a few added advantages – that’s all you and I can do,’ John said. ‘We can’t make a better world.’

  ‘And if you were going to mess with his brain, you would vote for ticking the box for the kind of genes that would have this advantaged person abandon his friend to the enemy and move on?’

  ‘If we were serious about wanting him to be a high achiever, he would have to be able to make hard decisions like that and be able to live with them.’

  Naomi touched his arm and looked up at him, searching his face. ‘I think that’s terrible.’

  ‘So what’s your solution?’

  ‘If we were really going to reconfigure our child’s mind, I’d want him to grow up with a value system that has much more honour than anything we are capable of understanding at present. Wouldn’t that be a truly better person?’

  John stared across the empty loungers towards the deck rail, and the ocean beyond. ‘What would your better person do?’

  ‘He’d stay with his friend and be comfortable with his decision – knowing that he could never have lived with himself if he’d gone on alone.’

  ‘That’s a nice way to think,’ John said. ‘But a child programmed like that would have no future out in the real world.’

  ‘That’s exactly why we’re right not to tamper with the compassion and sensitivity genes at all. We should just let Luke inherit whatever ones we have, at random. We’re both caring people – he can’t go too far wrong having our genes for these things, can he?’

  A deck hand walked past them, holding a toolbox, oil stains on his white jumpsuit. Genetic underclass. Dettore’s words echoed in his mind. In Huxley’s Brave New World they bred worker drones to do menial jobs. That’s what children of the future were destined to become if their parents did not have the vision to alter their genes.

  And the courage to take hard decisions when they did so.

  11

  Naomi’s Diary

  We sailed from Cuba tonight. John likes the occasional cigar and was miffed he wasn’t allowed ashore to buy any. Dr Dettore, who I’m convinced would have made a great politician, invited us to dine with him tonight in his private dining room. Got the impression this is an honour all ‘patients’ get once. Serious schmoozing. John was impressed with the food and he doesn’t impress easily.

  Today, Dr Dettore asked John and I how we met. Actually, more than that, he asked how I felt about John when we first met. It was at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I t
old him although I loved skiing, I had always been scared of heights, but, strangely, I hadn’t been scared with John. We met in a ski-lift queue and shared a chair together. We just got on really well. Then the bloody chair stopped at the steepest point; halfway up a rock face with a two-thousand-foot sheer drop below us, and swaying crazily. If I had been on my own I would have been scared witless. But John made me laugh. He made me feel I could fly, that I could do anything.

  I told Dr Dettore that. But I didn’t tell him the rest.

  I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t until Halley died that I realized for the first time that John had limitations, the same as all of us. That for a while I hated him. He’d made me believe he was a god, but when the chips were down he didn’t have any miracle, just tears like you and me. Just the same damned helplessness we all have in common. Now I still love him, but in a different way. I still find him enormously attractive. I feel safe with him. I trust him. But he no longer makes me feel I can fly.

  I wonder if all relationships that endure eventually reach this same point. A place where you are comfortable with each other. Where your dreams turn to reality, where you realize the secret of life is to know when it is good.

  And that you are bloody lucky.

  I have the feeling Dr Dettore is reaching for something more. That beneath all his charm there is a restlessness, a dissatisfaction. I’m normally very good at getting through to people, but although he is really affable, I find it hard to connect to him. Sometimes I have the sense he is contemptuous of ordinary human emotions. That he feels we should be above these and on some higher plane.

  That he has some kind of hidden agenda.

  12

  Naomi’s Diary

  Quite bizarre. We’re surrounded on this ship by millions of dollars of technology. Yet today, poor John had to sit in a cubicle off one of the labs with a plastic jar, a box of Kleenex and an assortment of pornographic videotapes. I hope Luke never gets to see this diary, I’d like him to have some romantic notions about his beginnings. Nice for him to know that he was conceived on a cruise in the Caribbean. Not so nice to discover his father had been sitting with his pants around his ankles watching Busty Babes Meet Big Boy.

  Dr D had a cute word for it. Harvesting. He told John, ‘Just need to harvest a little of your semen.’

  We’re both committed to this thing. But I keep thinking that maybe we should forget about it, go home, perhaps try to find some other way around our problem. Adopt, or have a surrogate child of some kind, or get pregnant from donor sperm. Or forget about children altogether. Plenty of couples don’t have children.

  I think maybe Dr D is angry that we’ve taken so few of his options. No more than a few dozen ticks out of almost three thousand. All we have done is agree to the bad disease genes being taken out, ensure Luke will be six foot tall, and make some improvements to his metabolism, which will help him stay fit and healthy. If we’d let Dettore have his head, we’d have ended up agreeing to create some kind of a superman. No thanks!

  But I’ll say one thing for Dr D, he is good at explaining stuff. Although he has a technique even John didn’t understand for separating high-quality sperm.

  It was a real harvest today. John’s semen and my eggs. Dr D was delighted with the crop – a total of twelve. He told me it had been worth all the pain of the injections (easy for him – he didn’t have them).

  He’s now having the entire genetic code of each embryo analysed. Cells from the strongest one will be selected. As I understand it, some of the disease genes will be removed or disabled. Females have two X chromosomes. Males have one X and one Y. By separating the Y chromosome sperms from the X chromosome sperms, Dr D will ensure the baby is a boy.

  Doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?

  In a fortnight, if it goes to plan, we’ll be home. And I’ll be pregnant.

  I wonder how I’ll feel.

  13

  Naomi had never been covetous of wealth. Sitting in John’s ageing Volvo on the 405, heading home from the airport, she was wrapped in her thoughts. Her feet nestled in the mess of papers in the footwell; photocopied documents, pamphlets, a playbill, chewing-gum and chocolate-bar wrappers, petrol receipts, parking tickets; the interior of his car was part filing cabinet and part dustbin. John didn’t seem to care about the mess. It was a tip; it looked like it might have recently been vacated by chickens.

  As he drove he was talking on the hands-free speaker-phone to a work colleague. Beneath her the tyres rumbled over a section of corrugated road surface; she paid no attention to any of the other cars on the road; she didn’t hanker after a Porsche or an open Mercedes or a custom Explorer. Cars were just transport to her. Yet, staring ahead towards the Hollywood Hills through the late-afternoon haze, she realized that seven years in Los Angeles had changed her in the way, she had noticed, it seemed to change most people who came here.

  Los Angeles made you want money. You couldn’t help yourself; you suddenly found yourself wanting things you’d never wanted before. And feeling emotions you’d never felt before. Such as envy.

  She loved their modest little single-storey house south of Pico. It had a roof deck, and an orange tree in the back yard that once a year produced a crop of deliciously sweet fruit, and a light, airy feel inside. It was their home, their sanctuary. And yet, sometimes when she saw swanky homes high up in the Hollywood hills, or close to the ocean in Malibu, she couldn’t help thinking that one of those would be a great place to raise a child.

  She pressed a hand to her tummy. Luke was just a speck inside her, a mere two weeks old, who would be going to school in a few years’ time. To me you’re a person now, Luke. How do you feel about that? Good? Me, too.

  After Halley was born, everyone had told her the best schools were in Beverly Hills, and they were the only schools a concerned parent could ever seriously consider – unless, of course, you particularly wanted your son to grow up as a pistol-toting crack dealer. But how would they ever be able to afford a home in Beverly Hills?

  John’s earnings were so limited. He was working on a book about his field, and sure, some impenetrable science books did become best-sellers, but his last book, although well reviewed in the academic press, had sold less than two thousand copies – and he had been pleased – he hadn’t even expected to sell that many!

  She would have to get her own career back into full gear, she decided. Since Halley’s death she’d been freelance, accepting occasional public relations work when she felt strong enough to cope. She had two months’ work starting next week, on the promotion for a new Oliver Stone movie, but nothing beyond that. It was time to go job-hunting in earnest, to phone all her contacts at the studios, networks and independent companies, perhaps take a permanent position after Luke was born. Something with career-ladder opportunities, maybe Showtime or HBO or MTV or Comedy Central, where she had the chance to move up to producing, and start making serious money.

  Enough money to move to Beverly Hills.

  Some hope, in the thick of this recession.

  It wasn’t even certain, of course, that they would remain in LA. John was up for tenure at USC next year and he really didn’t know whether he would get it. If he did, they would be committed to remaining in LA for a long time, probably the rest of his career, but if not, they might well have to move to another city, maybe even to another country. Although she liked the States, her dream was to live in England again one day, to be somewhere close to her mother and her older sister, Harriet.

  It felt strange being back. Neither of them had spoken much on the plane; she’d tried to watch a film but had ended up channel surfing, unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into the book she had bought in the airport before getting on the plane, called The Unborn Child – Caring For Your Foetus.

  They were both experiencing a reality check. After four weeks in the cocoon of the ship, they were coming back to be part of the normal world again. To nine months of pregnancy; to keeping absolutely quiet to their friends. To h
aving to be careful with every penny. To a thousand things that needed doing and organizing.

  Her pregnancy with Halley had been OK, but not especially great. Some of her friends seemed to sail through their terms; others had struggled. She had been up and down, with bad morning sickness, and she’d been very tired in the last months, which hadn’t been helped by a freak heatwave that had lasted from early June through to August. She’d read in some magazine that the second baby was meant to be much easier. She hoped so.

  John finished his call.

  ‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, just about, I think. Some software glitch with my human evolution program no one can fix. I’ll have to go in tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ she said. ‘Do you need to?’

  ‘Just for half an hour. And I have to get a load of stuff emailed off for Dettore. He seems pretty serious about coming up with funding – I mean, hell, his company spends billions on research – he could finance my whole department for the next thirty years out of petty cash.’

  ‘I know your half an hour. That means you’ll get home around midnight.’

  John smiled, then placed a hand on her belly. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Fine so far. Good as gold.’ She grinned and placed her hand on John’s. ‘I don’t want to spend tomorrow on my own. I feel kind of flat, nervous about, you know—’ She shrugged. ‘Let’s do something together. I understand you have to deal with your work, but can’t we spend some of it together – go for a hike in the canyons, perhaps? And go visit Halley’s grave – he’ll need fresh flowers, it’s been over a month.’

  ‘Sure, we’ll do that. And a hike sounds good. Nice to go and walk somewhere without the ground moving under us.’

  ‘I can still feel the ship swaying,’ Naomi said, pulling out of her handbag the printed booklet Dr Dettore had given her.