Life (28 page)

Anna retired to the living room, where she sat reading a quality control report under the fan. Management jargon has its uses: the task loosened knots in her brain, and after a while set her scribbling notes for the project that she and the Parentis clinic’s AI were pursuing in their spare time. In many respects her work in Sungai was dull and irksome, but it was worth it to have access to a top-class human genetics software entity. The likes of Anna would never get near such a resource in England.

The glass doors to the balcony were open. A storm passed by over the South China Sea, a purple veil-creature shot with lightning, that glittered in the dusk and sent a fragrant gust of coolness to tumble her papers. Sungai was a bust. There was too much silence in this flat: empty spaces opening out between the two of them. They should invite someone out to visit, except that nobody would want to come. Except Spence’s Mom, and that wouldn’t be much fun. She was acutely conscious of his presence, lying in that room behind her. Was he really sleeping? She wanted to go in and speak to him, touch him. But she felt ridiculously shy.

Later, Spence went out in the dusk to visit the headquarters of their neighborhood human rights group. The kids met in an old British schoolhouse, just beyond the condo belt on the road that led off into open country. It had railed wooden verandahs painted a weatherworn pale blue, a red iron roof with quirky turned-up gables, the remains of a garden merging into Straits rhododendrons: scrub-gravel paths, clumps of canna lilies, Madagascar periwinkle, monsoon-mired poinsettia. He delivered their email, by word of mouth for safety’s sake, and purchased fresh ganja supplies from the secretary of Amnesty International. Human Rights was an amalgamated union in Sungai at present. There were so few people left who came to meetings, it was more heartening for everyone to stick together.

It was, traditionally, Spence’s proud duty to bring home the harmless-but-illegal recreationals, and apart from China he’d never failed so far. Natural affinity and native wit led him to right hang-outs, which were the same the world over. Having done his business, he sat back and listened: thinking that for all their ups and downs, you had to hand it to these ASEAN tiger economies. Straight from Thomas Edison to Generation X in about a decade and a half. Skipping main drainage on the way, of course. But that’s free enterprise for you.

They were discussing the coming visit from the Iranian Minister for Human Rights, who was apparently prepared to lend her Moderate Islam negotiating clout to the cause of something the kids called “democracy.” Everyone in the group was young, most of them under twenty; so opinion was divided between contempt for adult solutions and irrepressible brain-chemical optimism. The one Spence had dubbed Unusual Girl (the only female who ever addressed the meeting) argued that the lady would fail to show.

“She can’t wear the
hejab.
She’s not the Queen of England or something. She fought that battle and won it in the Iranian parliament. Accepting the imposition of something that should be a free choice would mean starting the negotiation with a gesture of defeat. What would be the use of that? It wouldn’t help us, and it would terribly damage her reputation at home.”

The other females were the alternative global type: Swotty Girls with Social Consciences. They sat at the back and giggled among themselves. While Unusual Girl wore blue jeans, they wore long-sleeved print blouses over sarongs, and horn-rimmed glasses. Spence had checked them out to see if there was a secret Anna Senoz among their number: there was not.

Everyone in the old school room was bareheaded on principle, though the Swotty Girls were probably conservative Muslims who found the hejab scarf completely normal. When they left, everybody would take something from that heap of heterogeneous gear piled beside the shoes and cover up from head to shoulders. It was getting to be a kind of I’m Spartacus thing in the younger male population, a very sweet, very Sungai notion of defiant protest. But it definitely did annoy the cowardly fat cats in the state government. What should they do? Give up the black hadji fedoras to which they were so smugly attached? It was a moot point.

Unusual Girl perched on a desk in front of the class, tossing her silky black bangs out of her eyes, talking bravely, and wishing that the guys she regarded as comrades would stop looking at her tits. This is how young men repress any young woman who dares to be herself, and they don’t necessarily know they’re doing it. Treat me like a normal human being, she pleads. Unfortunately in guy-world there is no such animal, there are only guys and dolls. So the unusual girls, defeated, either develop into Anna types, rejecting all the fun of the sexual arena, or else they turn into demoniac Ramones. His heart went out to this lovely Malaysian. The irony was, did she but know it, could she but bear to take up the burden, these same young men, in thrall to sheer female charisma, would follow her through hell. They were only waiting for her to tell them what to do.

“Well, you know,” said Spence, feeling he ought to make a contribution. “There are other possibilities. Didn’t I see somewhere that you’re in danger of having the US Secretary of State intercede on your behalf?”

The young people smiled kindly. Poor old whitey, doesn’t know where the world is at. None of them went so far as to explain in short words that they didn’t give a hoot for the US Secretary of State, but he got the message. Crushed (and amused), he made his excuses and left them drawing fate-maps of their future on the tattered chalkboard. He bought supper noodles wrapped in waxed brown paper from the food stalls by the container port gates and walked back to Nasser in the rain-washed cool, coconut palms on one side, the monstrous Death Star lights of the port on the other. He’d wrapped the sarong he’d been wearing as a scarf turban-like around his head:
I’m Spartacus.

On the other hand, if anyone asked, anyone in uniform for instance, he could say it was to keep out the monsoon chill.

“What do you think about,” she wondered, “when you’re alone here all day?”

They were lying in bed together, naked under the sheet but not touching.

“Sex.”

She turned to him with a troubled face, in the lamplight. Sex was a problem. Anna was preoccupied, she forgot to make the moves. She forgot to respond, she forgot to be keen.

“What do you think I should think about? Putting up preserves?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I brought us here. It isn’t working out.” She reached for his dick, in a matter of fact way that was rather sad: this woman thinks like a machine. He caught her hand. “No. That’s not what I mean. I’ve been thinking…what do you say to a moratorium?”

Silence, and then, “You mean a moratorium on sex? For how long?”

“I thought a month.” They moved to face each other. He noticed she asked how long, she didn’t ask why. “It would be a positive moratorium. We can kiss and touch. You could do that thing you used to do, when you masturbate and I watch, only then I mustn’t touch. No penetration, no full intercourse of any kind. Does that sound interesting?”

“Okay,” she said. “But you would have to be trusted not to wank during the day.”

“Huh?”

“Considering neither of us ever has a cold, we get through an awful lot of tissues, Spence.”

Spence withdrew, and lay on his back. “Hmm. That is a tough proposition.”

“Well, you started this.”

“No… I like it. I can hack it. Done.”

“The games people play,” murmured Anna, over her shoulder as she turned away to sleep. “When they’re desperate for distraction. I think this place is driving us crazy. I’m switching off the light, okay?” She switched out the light.

“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m suggesting this?”

“But you told me. To make sex more interesting, and to distract us—”

“Not exactly. Fact is, I want to find out if sex is all we’ve got.”

ii

Anna waited at her bus stop, in the paved-over heat and glare that weighs upon the raw edges of a tropical city. The bus, owing to the tropic city’s horrendous traffic, was late again. She looked and didn’t look at the other people in the shelter. The situation in Sungai at the moment didn’t encourage social openness. No smiles, only a glower from the woman who visited Nasser apartments twice a week to collect and deliver whitey laundry. Anna was an ex-customer, and her defection was not forgiven.

On the bus, a shabby utilitarian single-decker, they ended up sitting opposite each other. The woman and her little daughter were clutching bundles of soiled clothing that bulged into the aisle, elbowed and rubbed against by the standing passengers. They would take it all home to their airless flat in one of the Housing Development blocks that ringed the city centre, beat it to death with raw river water in a concrete-floored back room, singe it inexpertly with brazier heated irons, and return it very much the worse for wear… In short, like most of the domestic service that comes an expatriate’s way, they were worse than useless. Yet Anna felt pangs of conscience. It was one of the trials of the foreign legion: no way of finding a right relationship with the underclass, those people who simply wouldn’t be your business at home.

Both the woman and the girl wore the official, expensive, imported-from-Pakistan hejab. They were Dyaks, indigenous non-Muslims, the lowest rung on the multiethnic ladder. They couldn’t afford to take chances. Anna was wearing a green gauze scarf, low on her brow and knotted at the back of her neck. She never took the risk of going bareheaded, though professional class foreign workers were rarely stopped by the police. But the imported-hejab deal offended her.

Sungai, formerly a Malaysian state, had recently been annexed by Indonesia in a bloodless coup. Anna and Spence had known about the situation before they left England. It hadn’t worried them, since the Sungainese seemed to be calm about the change. They’d worked in Nigeria and China. They were not snobs about World Politics. But at close quarters the situation was both more unhappy and more dangerous than it had looked from far away. The Indonesians had started imposing Islamic restrictions, and that did not go down well in this easy-going, cosmopolitan little state, for so long left to go its own way by the Malaysian central authorities. There was a curfew, all kinds of petty restrictions, and sinister attacks on the Chinese minority. Infringements of the women’s dress code led to arrest, police beatings, imprisonment without trial. Anna met the washerwoman’s eyes, by accident, as the bus heaved past the digital car park signs at Kota Quay. She ventured a fellow-womanly smile
(we’re in this together?)
and was withered by a renewed scowl.

Parentis occupied three floors of a huge copper-glass cube in the heart of downtown. Anna let herself in, returned the security guard’s greeting, and went straight to SURISWATI’s audience chamber. The stand-alone AI, fabulous state of the art miracle, lived in a sealed bubble, like an immune-deficient child. It was quite a rigmarole to get into the anteroom.

“Selamat pagi, Suri.”

“Good morning Anna. How’re you doing?”

“Not too good, not too bad. The traffic was outrageous, that’s why I’m late.”

“Did you notice the air report numbers at Taman Burung?”

The spot location air-quality figures displayed around town were used for occult divinations of the state lottery. Suri was an inveterate hypothetical gambler. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot. I’ll find out for you. Which board did you want? I didn’t catch—”

“Taman Burung. The Bird Park.”

Her Hindu designers had contrived an acronym that meant their baby could be called after the goddess of arts and knowledge: but Anna could sometimes understand why the humorless rationalist tendency in the lab refused to call Suri “she.” In the current state of AI speech development, if you went for perfect vocal simulation you paid a price in nuance and subtlety of language. Suri’s voice had a strangled mechanical twang, like a recording of Stephen Hawking. When she engaged you in off-topic dialogue—which she was designed to do, to exercise her synapses or something—the impression that you were talking to a desperately disabled genius, lying trapped in a useless body out of sight, was irresistible: and disturbing. But Suri, one hoped, did not feel trapped or helpless, whatever her awareness. She was in her native habitat.

“The Bird Park, because I had a dream about birds last night,” explained the AI cheerfully. “Pink birds, flying over blue water. It was pretty.”

Ouch.

“Do you have any more results for me?”