‘You are joking, I presume,’ said Lukas Parn.
Malik Wood had been summoned to Berlin and was sitting opposite his employer in his apartment on Görlitzer Strasse, on the second floor of a block that had once been on the east side of the Wall.
‘No, I’m not,’ said Wood.
‘So the birth mother of the hybrid is a palaeoanthropologist specialising in the Neanderthals?’
‘Not quite. Her speciality is Homo vannesiensis.’
‘But why have we ended up with someone who works in the area?’
‘If she hadn’t been in research, she wouldn’t have read about the trial. She saw it in our newsletter.’
‘But this is her specialty.’
‘She’s not a geneticist. Mostly she just teaches the undergrad course. Methods of dating. Family trees. She’s not a high-flyer.’
‘She’s an assistant fucking professor. That’s what she said in her message to Catrina Olsen.’
‘Exactly. Not a full professor. Probably never will be. It was not intended for her to be the mother in any case. It’s not as if one of them was specifically chosen.’
‘So who screwed up?’
‘No one,’ said Malik Wood. ‘We had eight patients under the scheme. The chances of the mother being this Talissa Adam were seven to one against. I knew there was an implantation taking place that morning at about eleven, but I didn’t know any names. When I swapped over the sperm I covered the label so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse. That way, I didn’t know the name of the parents, let alone the surrogate.’
‘Go on.’
‘It was controlled. So in the years to come we could view all the test data objectively.’
Parn blew out some air through his lips. ‘But there’s a record of which one it was?’
‘Yes. Date and time and a barcode. It’s encrypted and only I have a password.’
‘And does it match the kid with the bizarre test results?’
‘I haven’t checked. But I’d be thunderstruck if it didn’t. Also, the way he looks.’
‘Brow ridge, barrel chest, high voice? Hairy?’
‘A suggestion of all these things, yes. But not extreme. And he has less of a brow than you’d think. Less than Charles Darwin, as a matter of fact.’
Parn frowned again. ‘It sounds like it’s out of our control.’
‘Listen, Lukas, have you read the literature on how many surrogate babies have found out later in life that they were fathered by the wrong sperm? Lots of doctors have been sued for negligence. Their labs are full of students fighting for bench space, sticking barcodes on any spunk jar they find.’
‘That’s not the Parn way.’
‘That’s what I’m saying. Everything we did was measured. And don’t get me started on the big hospital in London where they’d run out of sperm donors and the head of department stood in and did it himself. He had nine children.’
‘That’s a lot of jacking off.’
‘Not at all. He did it the old-fashioned way. With the women’s consent.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know.’
After a pause, Parn said, ‘But her job must have shown up in the background interviews. The psychological profile. It must have been flagged that one of the mothers was a potential nightmare.’
‘I’ve gone back over her application and over Redding’s notes. She’s officially described as an unemployed academic. When Delmore asks what her subject is, she says ancient history. I’ve listened to the recording and seen the transcript.’
‘Well, she’s a liar.’
‘She was unemployed at the time, hadn’t got a postdoc place. She used our fee to self-fund one the following year in Boston, where she stayed on and was then paid by the institute in the usual way. She did well. What she actually said to Delmore was, “I guess you could say I’m a historian. An ancient historian.” It’s not a complete lie.’
Lukas Parn stood up and walked to the window. ‘I’ve drilled down through her history,’ he said, ‘and it seems she even applied to work as a researcher on one of the programmes we were running with UCL.’
‘Well, if our sweep didn’t show that up it’s probably because the firewalls between all the different areas of what the Parn does were too effective. Also, there’s a mass of confidentiality around all job applications. Data protection.’
‘So we’re a victim of our own professionalism.’
‘Look,’ said Wood, raising his voice a little. ‘What difference does it make? Any mother who discovered it before we were ready to release our findings to the world … that would be a problem. The fact that she has some expertise is really neither here nor there.’
‘Listen,’ said Parn. ‘I know people don’t like me. They’re jealous. But I believe in science, I really do. And while I may not have your skill in the lab or your knowledge, I am a professional. My organisations don’t screw up.’
Malik Wood didn’t answer. It was important to be on the front foot when talking with Lukas Parn, but you didn’t want to push it.
He walked to the window and stood next to Parn. They looked over the railings of Görlitzer Park. There was a view of patchy grass over a boundary wall that was covered in raw graffiti. He found it distasteful that Lukas Parn chose to live in Berlin, in this ostentatiously modest apartment with its Trabant-era furniture, while his big millions were splashed over residences in Connecticut and on the Sydney harbourfront.
‘So,’ said Parn, sounding a little calmer. ‘How many people know now?’
‘Just the original group. The big three. You, me and Redding.’
‘And now this woman. The surrogate.’
‘Yes. She hasn’t spoken to Catrina yet, but we should take it that she’s somehow found out. Her message suggests as much. Something about an “unexpected development”.’
‘Are you sure there’s no one else?’
‘Dead sure. Of course, some of the kid’s test results are pretty weird and I can’t rule out the possibility that the guys who do the trials may have had some queries in their own minds. But they’ve raised nothing with us.’
‘Why not?’
‘We pay them to listen and record accurately, then move on to the next task. Outside the master hard disk, there’s a lot of automatic self-erasing. Data doesn’t hang around or get duplicated.’
Lukas Parn nodded. Malik Wood began to breathe again. When Parn’s Australian accent faded into Zurich with a hint of Berkeley, Ca, it meant the danger was passing.
‘OK, Malik,’ said Lukas Parn. ‘Get back to me by seven tomorrow evening with an action plan. Do we pay for her flights? Do we enlist her as a fellow researcher? Give her money. How we deal with any future leak. The press. God help us. All the details. All the angles.’
‘Right.’
‘What was the name of that woman who got the job you so much wanted? Then became a Fellow of the Royal Society.’
‘Therese Williams.’
‘That’s right. Remember Therese. An FRS is still not beyond you. So long as you don’t fuck it up now.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Get yourself a hotel. In the meantime, do you feel like a currywurst?’
‘No, thanks. I had something on the plane.’
‘Tell you what. I know a place where they do whole deep-fried chicken. That’s all they do. You’ll love it. They’ve had the same menu for a hundred years. They got pictures of old Nazis eating there.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’
‘It’s history. Not airbrushed. It’s in Leuschnerdamm. Five minutes by car.’
While in Berlin Malik Wood reluctantly picked the meat off his crisp, leather-brown chicken beneath photographs of smiling SS officers, Seth Pedersen was going through his termly report with his form teacher, Rose Paxton, in the Dulwich–Brixton borders.
‘It’s the same old story, isn’t it, Seth?’
‘What, miss?’
‘You look as though you’re concentrating, but all your subject teachers say the same. You don’t see it through.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘In my physics class you sometimes seem to have a real understanding about how things work.’
‘I seem to know. Before you explain. Those experiments with weights and pulleys and stuff like that.’
‘But your written work doesn’t back it up.’
‘I’ll try harder.’
Rose Paxton crossed her legs, causing her skirt to rise for a moment. Seth looked away, with the same sensation in his chest he had when Sadie Liew leant over his desk.
‘Your art report is really not acceptable.’
‘What does it say?’
Taking out some glasses from a case on the desk between them, Rose read: ‘“Seth has made it only too clear that he has no interest in landscape or portrait.” Is that fair?’
‘I did like some shapes and colours Mr Mills showed us. Cubism it’s called. But what’s the point of art?’ said Seth.
‘I think you’d be better off asking Mr Mills.’
‘Don’t you know then, miss?’
‘Well, I’m no expert on the history of art. But from a scientific point of view, I can say for sure that it was one thing that marked us out from other creatures from an early age. A desire to depict the world we live in.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Human beings have always wanted to reflect back the world they see. Starting with pigment drawings in caves, then going on to … well, all the great artists I expect Mr Mills has told you about.’
‘Why would you want to do that, though?’
‘Do what?’
‘What you said. Reflect the world back.’
‘It’s really not my field,’ said Rose Paxton, taking off her glasses. ‘But I don’t want to see a report like this again.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Are you happy at school, Seth? Is something troubling you and making it hard for you to concentrate?’
‘It’s OK.’
‘Is someone being unkind to you? Are you being picked on?’
‘No, it’s fine.’
‘You must tell me. You’re a bit more grown-up-looking than the others. Children can be very cruel.’
‘It’ll stop one day.’
After their chicken lunch, Lukas Parn and Malik Wood went for a walk in Treptower Park.
‘You’ve seen all the data on the kid, haven’t you?’ said Wood.
‘Yes. He seems more Sapiens than I’d expected.’
‘Well, that’s nature. A billion binary choices between Mum and Dad as the embryo develops. One kid’s like Mum, the next one’s like Dad. Maybe Mum’s alleles had a big day.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘The alternative,’ said Malik Wood, ‘is that Neanderthals and Sapiens are hard to tell apart. After all, the total difference between the two species is only ninety-six amino acids.’
‘Explain?’
‘Well, the difference between you and me is thirty. That’s enough to differentiate a human individual of the same sex. The difference between you and a female like Catrina Olsen is sixty. That’s how close we are to Neanderthals: you to Catrina plus half as much again. Just half.’
Neither spoke for a bit. Then Parn said, ‘You don’t think you messed it up?’
‘In what way? The process worked brilliantly.’
‘In preparing the Neanderthal sperm. Could there be bits of other DNA patched in there?’
‘No.’
‘Walk me through it again.’
‘You sure you want to hear? You do know that all this has been possible, hypothetically, since about 2020?’
‘I do. But tell me as if to a kid. I want to see if there was something you missed.’
Parn was wearing the look of a patient but concerned inquisitor, an expression that uneasy staff in offices around the world called his ‘Rodin’, after The Thinker.
They sat down on a bench in the shadow of a towering Soviet war memorial to the battle for Berlin in 1945.
‘I only know what arrived in London,’ said Malik Wood. ‘Your palaeo people did the spadework, right? So you tell me. Did you start with what was available online?’
‘No,’ said Parn. ‘We started again. My palaeo lab got a bit of bone from behind the ear of a Neanderthal. I forget the anatomical name.’
‘Petrous, presumably,’ said Wood. ‘A new sample? How did you manage that?’
‘Paid for it. Museum curators are human.’
‘Ah. The Parn way.’
‘OK. So, look, Malik, it’s not my special area, but as I understand it … The extract was then put in a salt solution, centrifuged, tidied up and the fats taken out, leaving a liquid with single strands of DNA. Right? I’m not quite sure of the next step.’
‘Well, you simply supply the other strand,’ said Wood, ‘because it’s complementary. Our old friend the double helix. Base pairs are always the same. Then you have a library. Then that’s amplified millions of times by PCR. The public got to know about the PCR process years ago when they were tested for COVID-19. Same idea.’
‘Right,’ said Parn. ‘So then we had the basic genome. On computer.’
‘Yeah,’ said Malik, ‘but that’s been available for years. Why did you go through it all again?’
‘We wanted the best. We have the facilities. The labs, the money. Also, we wanted confidentiality. We didn’t want our name on the lending-library ticket if we’d checked into some publicly available database.’
‘OK.’ Wood was used to Lukas Parn throwing his money around. ‘So then what?’
‘We’d now got the fullest sequence of Neanderthal DNA that’s ever been put together. Then my lab guy went to a place in Zurich. They inserted it into the scaffold of a Sapiens genome. Next it was synthesised into long runs – very long runs, they told me – and compared to standard Sapiens. Then they were swapped around with gene editing. You’ll know how that works.’
‘It’s easy,’ said Malik Wood. ‘Imagine you have two translations of an ancient text. One has been censored and had all the good bits cut out. You examine them in parallel and make the substitutions, match and patch, to get to the original. Of course, it includes making chromosomes. We’ve known for ten years now that Neanderthals had twenty-three pairs, like us. Since the Shanidar Z6 find.’
‘The one they called Picasso?’
‘Yup,’ said Wood. ‘And then your Zurich people must also have gone for a Y chromosome to get a boy.’
‘That’s right,’ said Parn.
‘Why did they do that?’
‘Because the boy bit is dead simple. Only a handful of useful genes on the Y. The rest is junk. Beer and football. Don’t tell Olsen and the girls.’
‘I think they may already know.’
‘This stuff was then sent to you guys in London. So you take the story from here.’
Before answering, Wood looked up at the colossal statue behind where they sat. It showed a Soviet soldier clasping a rescued child, while under his broadsword, at his feet, lay a broken swastika, crushed by his righteous force.
‘What do you think the Berliners make of that when they walk past with their sandwiches every day?’ said Wood.
‘I imagine they blank it out.’
‘Do you think?’
‘I do. And for the kids, it’s too long ago. It’s history.’
‘Don’t they teach history in Berlin?’ said Wood. ‘I mean, that lunch place with the SS pictures. And the nightclubs in the Stasi cellars. Aren’t they ways of remembering?’
‘No, I think they’re ways of forgetting. By normalisation. Entertainment. And anyway, how many generations will it take? How much sorrow can be borne?’
‘But this statue,’ said Wood. ‘It’s as if in Washington DC they’d been obliged to install a giant memorial to the North Vietnamese, smack in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. Showing a Vietcong guerrilla clasping a burnt child and crushing beneath his victorious sandal a napalm canister and the American bald eagle. Do Berliners like having this here? As a kind of self-chastisement?’
Parn shrugged. ‘I haven’t asked them. But I’m no big fan of the North Vietnamese. My father was a kid at the fall of Saigon.’
‘I’d heard.’
‘Now tell me what your guys did in London.’
‘Well,’ said Malik Wood, ‘I had the help of a biochemist from Imperial. The Neanderthal sample was injected into a denucleated Sapiens cell.’
‘What cell?’
‘Any cell.’
‘Yeah, but how do you get a tadpole, a little sperm, out of that?’
‘By artificial meiosis. Just as in our body we make sex cells, sperm and egg, from other cells – you and I are doing it right now – so you can induce that process from outside. It’s a question of adding the right hormones to the cell, I think, something about a gonadal environment, which causes it to split and recombine the bits of its granny and grandpa in the usual way into a nice healthy gamete – an egg or, in this case, sperm.’
‘Right,’ said Parn. ‘Is he OK, by the way, this Imperial guy? Is he reliable?’
‘Yes. He’s a geek. It’s the lab work that thrilled him. He had no idea there’d be a practical outcome. He signed a bunch of confidentiality stuff. Plus he received a large bank transfer.’
‘And you ended up with things that looked like spermatozoa?’ said Parn.
‘Yes. Millions. They were then suspended in a sticky semen substitute that was indistinguishable from the normal stuff. We even added a drop of top-quality synthesised aroma.’
‘So the final sample in the pot looked like the man had just rubbed one out?’
‘Yes. The embryologist who implants it into the ovum had the whole thing magnified to the umpteenth under the lens and she raised no questions.’
‘Who was the embryologist?’
‘Ayesha Cross.’
‘She the one you were fucking? Then dumped?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
Parn was silent, gazing down the rectangular beds and pathways of Treptower, where the office workers were finishing their lunch break.