A year after Seth had graduated, a rumour began to circulate. At first, it was shared only between people hungry for sensation and stayed within their orbit. It stated that a human of an older species, thought to be Homo vannesiensis, was alive and walking undetected down the streets of an American city.
It was a typical summer story. News outlets adopted and explained the very British joke about ‘white’ and ‘Vannes’ and ‘man’, and brutish manners at the wheel. ‘White Van Man Lives!’ became a catchphrase in the public mind. Populist networks included daily updates on their bulletins and invited evidence of ‘sightings’. Thousands of elementary-school children sent in photographs of their classmates.
The handful of scientists who were consulted for their opinion were dismissive, saying that the latest Big Foot or Yeti rumour was not going to make them lift their eyes from their real work, even in a slow July. ‘It’s like the old days of the National Enquirer,’ a Yale professor sighed. In August, a man in Sioux Falls, South Dakota was pursued by drunken college students and held down while they pulled out some of his hair with a view to having it DNA-tested. The students were arrested and fined; the man in question brought an action against the city police for failing to protect him.
Watching a newsfeed one night, Talissa became aware of the incident when it was included as the tailpiece to the main bulletin, framed as a student prank. It caused her a moment of panic, but seemed a long way removed from Seth. Then, a few days later, FBC, the last remaining news organisation with the resources to fact-check its stories, ran a short item. They had contacted a palaeoanthropologist from Harvard, who gave an opinion on the feasibility of the clone idea (low), and the head of the human genomics department in Cambridge, England, who believed it was technically possible. With no further facts coming to light, the item became holiday-season fodder for loudmouths and ‘prompters’, then began to fade away.
In September, however, a little-known news organisation called Galatia started to pursue the story with more vigour. Galatia was financed by Christian fundamentalists with cavernous pockets. By the end of October, it had turned its attention to the various activities of the Lukas Parn Foundation; by December it had established that one of Parn’s establishments had bred a thylacine which had been kennelled in a remote part of Wyoming. They published photographs that purported to show the animal in its compound, though it had died at the age of three, lonely despite its hectic sexual life and unable to adjust to the modern world.
Under pressure from the media, Sheila Rahm, the Parn’s vice-president, public relations, gave a statement in New York confirming the thylacine experiment and revealing that they had in addition bred an aurochs and a woolly mammoth, neither of which had survived. She concluded by saying: ‘These were experiments in the name of scientific research, though we are not yet ready to publish our detailed findings. The Parn Foundation is dismayed by the sensational tone of the recent coverage. We hold ourselves to the highest scientific standards. I would like to make it clear that we have no plans to try and revive any other extinct species.’
The implication of the Parn Foundation made Talissa think again. Could it be that someone had leaked or discovered something? If so, how had it travelled so far from the facts? A clone not a hybrid, and the wrong species at that? Was all news reporting really so inaccurate? She still had Lukas Parn’s personal message ID, but hesitated to use it.
The other possible person to consult was Susan Kovalenko. She might well be hurt at not having been asked before; but sitting at her desk, with Pelham snoozing on his beanbag alongside, Talissa wondered if this might be the moment to be bold – fearless, even.
Then, as she began to type, she saw there was a new message for her.
It read in harsh italics: ‘We know what you did’.
There was no given end point for the message, but after the words was a Sun Cross symbol: a plus sign in a circle, which had been used in Bronze Age religions and had recently been adopted by the Vector group – possibly, it was said, because it was rudimentary enough to be within the drawing capabilities of all their members.
At the same time, half a dozen cars were pulling up on the gravel parking lot of an expensive small hotel in the shadow of the Luberon mountains in Provence. It was late afternoon, but the heat was still pressing. The guests were told by a young woman in a grey linen uniform to leave their bags and walk up the short avenue of olive trees to the terrace of the restaurant, Le Panier de Paille, where drinks were waiting for them.
Lukas Parn had chosen the place on a whim, drawn by a swimming pool that was not the usual rectangle but a saltwater lake sculpted into the limestone slope beneath the main terrace. He had booked out all sixteen rooms, though his party numbered just five. In addition to himself, there were Malik Wood and Delmore Redding, making up the original ‘Big Three’. Catrina Olsen had resigned from the institute after she had discovered from Talissa Adam what had taken place; she had refused a severance payment on the grounds that it was an attempt to buy her silence and her original contract of employment was already restrictive enough. The others at the hotel were Sheila Rahm, the head of PR in New York, and a barrister from Gray’s Inn, London, called Celeste Usman, whose expensive opinion had pleased Lukas Parn.
The first night was down to ‘orientation’, which meant more drinks on the terrace, followed by dinner.
‘Woody, you do the ordering,’ said Parn. ‘Get me a Pepsi. I know they have it because we got some sent ahead.’
‘All right,’ said Malik Wood. ‘But my French is not up to much.’
‘I can speak French,’ said Celeste Usman.
‘OK, what’s French for corn dog?’ said Parn.
‘Chien de maïs. Literally. But I doubt they’ll have that.’
‘Oh, I think they will.’
‘Oh God, not a currywurst, please, Lukas,’ said Malik Wood.
‘You guys,’ said Parn. ‘You just don’t understand the service industry. The clue’s in the name.’
In the end, they all ate roast langoustines on a bed of ‘courgette caviar’ and the agneau de Provence en plusieurs cuissons.
‘Lamb and mash,’ said Parn, cutting up what was on his plate. ‘I can live with that.’
The wine list insisted on organic regional suppliers and respect for ‘terroir’.
‘I’m not having you drinking the local neck oil,’ said Parn. ‘We’ve got work to get through tomorrow. You don’t want a biodynamic hangover.’
After a brief talk with the English-speaking sommelier, Malik Wood persuaded him to open up his reserve cellar. ‘Let’s have the Château-Grillet,’ he said. Celeste Usman was the only one to keep up with Malik Wood as a sequence of bottles were ferried in by the impassive staff.
They moved to the veranda in front of the main building, where a bottle of Armagnac and five miniature tumblers were left on a table with candles in glass sleeves and two cans of Pepsi on ice.
In the morning, after a muted breakfast in the back courtyard, they gathered in Parn’s suite, where the sitting room had linen-covered sofas arranged round a low stone table, on which sat jugs of coffee and iced water. The room, while opulent, was windowless. Parn instructed them all to sit, though he himself remained standing.
‘OK, to kick off, I’ve got some news for you,’ he said. ‘We haven’t just come down here to eat some fancy food and drink too much alcohol. Have some water, Malik, you look like a fucking ghost.’
Wood did as he was told, his hand trembling from his share of the magnum of red that had followed the white wine.
‘Here’s the thing,’ said Parn. ‘On Friday night I heard back from our people in Irkutsk. We’ve made a breakthrough. They’ve found an immaculately preserved cave site, an actual settlement of Neanderthals and early modern humans living together. It’s miles from anywhere, that’s the problem, but we got some ultra-strong scanners where the permafrost was thinnest and they kept coming back with these interesting shadows. Then we mined. Looks like there was some big geological incident.’
‘What sort of incident?’ said Wood.
‘Fuck, I don’t know. It was a long time ago, mate. A glacier, a landslide. Those guys were always living through it.’
‘A volcano?’ said Sheila Rahm.
‘No. There are no volcanoes in the area. But the result is a bit like Pompeii, a settlement frozen at a moment in time. Men and women trapped in a yedoma ice cave. There’s even a dog.’
Parn was nervously active in the way that unsettled his staff around the world. He always had one piece of information more than they did – sometimes, like this, shocking or impossible to dismiss. But he revealed it all in a rush, from the corner of his mouth, so they could barely take it in before they were expected to be fully up to speed with it.
Malik Wood noticed a thin rime of white around the base of Parn’s nostrils, something he had become familiar with in the course of big meetings and press conferences.
Parn went to a projector at the end of the room and pressed a button. On the bare plastered wall, there appeared a photograph, quite indistinct, but in which they could make out different skulls, ribs and femora, with handwritten labels – ‘Sap (F) 22b’ or ‘Nean (M)19a’ – superimposed on the layered silt.
‘What’s the date?’ said Sheila, a notebook open on her knee.
‘It’s forty-six thousand years before the present. We’ve got a squad of Russian helpers. Ex-army. It’ll take years to dig everything out and date it. Obviously, it’s all super-secret at the moment. I’m pumping cash into the security of the site. Luckily, it’s such a godforsaken place that no one goes there of their own free will. The locals say that even the birds fly upside down so they don’t have to look.’
‘But it has a relevance,’ said Delmore Redding. ‘To our hybrid.’
‘Sure does. It shows that we cohabited with Neanderthals. We didn’t rape their women or keep them in brothels or as slaves.’
‘Or vice versa, presumably,’ said Sheila.
‘Exactly. Neanderthals were stronger, physically, but they didn’t kill off the new people. Us. There was something to be had from collaboration. From breeding.’
‘That’s what Sapiens was always good at,’ said Malik Wood. ‘From maybe eight hundred and fifty individuals in the Exodus Event to a peak world population a few years back of almost nine billion. That’s a lot of sex.’
‘All right,’ said Parn. ‘Let’s talk about our young hybrid. We’ve now had more than twenty years of observation. Malik, can you give us the headlines? Keep it simple, keep it short.’
‘I suppose the main finding is this,’ said Wood, putting down his cup with a rattle. ‘The thing we thought defined modern humans – us – was in fact available to other creatures. Neanderthals had a consciousness very much like ours, and in some ways superior. I think we will be able to show one day that there were several levels, or perhaps flavours, of human consciousness. It’s not a single entity. Also, that different people alive today may have inherited different versions of it.’
There was a pause. Then Delmore Redding spoke. ‘The absolute bedrock of civilisation,’ he said, ‘is that if today a Peruvian, descended from the Aztecs, met a founder Australian or a Namibian of a long-established habitat or—’
‘We get the point, Del,’ said Parn.
‘—they would all assume and recognise the same thought processes in the other, whatever the differences in appearance. That’s what makes us human. That’s the absolute bedrock.’
‘Correct,’ said Wood.
‘And you’re saying that isn’t true?’ said Redding.
‘I’m saying that all these people you mention may be running on slightly different systems.’
‘That’s an extremely dangerous view.’
‘It takes an adjustment,’ said Wood. ‘But I don’t believe it’s reductive. You have to open your mind to the idea of diversity. People have different hair colour and that’s OK. They can also have slightly different mental processes without being different species and without any loss of dignity, or any threat to their human rights. There isn’t just one magic faculty that makes us who we are.’
‘And we have this from the kid? The London hybrid?’ said Sheila. ‘What’s his name, by the way?’
‘Don’t know,’ said Malik Wood. ‘We still follow up all eight kids in the trial. One is massively different. He – or she – is known as Number Seven.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said Parn, ‘I think Delmore knows the name, but let’s not go there. Malik, can you, for the sake of the non-scientists, give a very brief explanation of where we’ve reached?’
‘I’ll try. But there’s only so much you can do to make it completely simple. So brace yourselves.’
Malik Wood drew a deep breath. He spoke of the Garden of Eden and the moment at which Adam and Eve became aware of being naked – a sudden change of awareness when they had eaten the apple: a parable of what actually happened in evolution, perhaps. He talked of how a child of maybe three or four years old first starts to know that it is a named individual who will wake up the same person tomorrow, not just a ball of pain and want, but a repeating entity. Briefly, he touched on other creatures and their levels of consciousness, the way that chimps and corvids could use tools, how a certain species of bird knew how to start a forest fire to drive out prey. He invoked Shakespeare, who, he said, more or less invented the idea that each human was different, but also to some extent predictable, according to both their inheritance and their sense of themselves: Malvolio was not Ophelia. Above all, he said, it was consciousness that had made us a little lower than the angels but far above all other species; for centuries it was believed to be the defining human attribute.
‘So for a long time, people thought there was a separate entity, a self or a soul, like a pilot in the brain. Religion embedded this idea. It was called dualism, and for ages it was the orthodoxy. Until the last century, when the consensus changed and we began to believe that our brains are actually just a bunch of neurons, same as the brains of other species – and that the idea of a “self” is a delusion. We are one unified collection of cells, not two. The sense of a pilot or a soul had been helpful in the story of our survival. But it was at best a “necessary fiction”. It was unscientific to believe it was a separate entity. Dualism became a laughing stock.’
Celeste, the lawyer, moved discreetly on to her third cup of coffee; Sheila’s pen was at the ready, but she was still not writing.
‘Fair enough, Woody,’ said Lukas Parn. ‘I have a feeling the shit’s about to hit the fan. Are you about to use the words “nucleotide bases”?’
‘No,’ said Wood. ‘Late last century, the idea came up that consciousness was a “spandrel”.’
‘What the bloody hell is a spandrel?’
‘You don’t need to know. I prefer to think of it as a logo. Fashion-conscious people pay thousands of dollars to have the right badge on their shoes or watches or handbags. Sometimes it’s just a little star or circle – or initials even. But it’s cool, it sends your friends a message. It says you’re pals with some big star. You’re rich. It’s what gets traded, it’s the defining thing. But it has nothing whatever to do with the shoe, which is designed as sole, upper, closure, arch support and so on.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Parn, ‘but what have shoes got to do with—’
‘Consciousness is what distinguishes us from thrushes and tapeworms, sure, but it’s inessential,’ said Wood. ‘We’d be fine without it. It is in fact an “unnecessary fiction”. It’s a logo.’
‘But,’ said Parn, ‘if it has no use, how come it has survived all the ages of human evolution?’
‘Well, for a start, our evolution is not yet long at all, compared to that of other human species. And second, the genes that code for the synapses in the brain that give us the faculty are probably located in the genome next to other much more essential genes. It is those other genes that have been positively selected, not the logo.’
‘Such as?’ said Delmore Redding.
‘Disease resistance would be my guess.’
‘Wouldn’t the genes for the logo be elsewhere on the—’
‘No. Genes can easily hitch-hike on a part of the genome where they might seem out of place. They are just survivors, entirely selfish. They’ll cling on anywhere.’
‘But the logo genes might be selected against?’ said Redding. ‘If they don’t really help us?’
‘Absolutely. In due course they probably will be. But it looks like they’ve found a secure little ride. They’re clinging on tight. For the time being.’
Malik Wood drank some more water. His hangover seemed to be retreating. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’m now going to give you a dramatically simplified version of how the logo actually works. Please don’t take notes or I’ll get drummed out of every professional body for gross oversimplification.’
‘Is that a thing?’ said Sheila.
‘No,’ said Celeste Usman. ‘Not in law.’
‘Anyway,’ said Malik Wood. ‘Handsets away.’
A German neuroscientist called Alois Glockner, he told them, had had access to a massively powerful SADS (synaptic activity dual spectroscopy) scanner that could show what went on in the actual synapse. Complete chaos. Too much. But through connections in the commercial world, he got hold of a program that helped him run the scans at super-slow speeds. Then he discovered something: that there was a moment when all the data coming in from the senses cohered with data from the major organs. For a moment there was ‘binding’, then for a microsecond ‘ignition’; so the creature, whether dolphin, crow or human, had the sensation of being an entity. The moment passed too quickly to be useful. But Glockner put his name on it.
‘Glockner’s Isthmus,’ said Redding. ‘I remember that.’
‘Yes,’ said Wood. ‘And it was unitary. Just sensory. No dualism. So that was all good. The next bit was an accident. And like the first Victorian breakthrough, it was the result of an industrial accident.’
A Greek docker in Piraeus had fallen from a height and impaled his lower jaw on a piece of iron sticking from a concrete slab. It had gone up through his palate into his brain, where, sawn off by paramedics from the concrete, it stayed lodged while hospital doctors tried for several days to find a way to help. Far from losing consciousness, the man was hyper-alert. Instead of being only periodically self-aware before lapsing into the more normal version of ‘screen-saver’ consciousness, he was fully ‘on’ all the time. Beatrice Rossi, an Italian neuroscientist, believed the bar was pressing on the seat of the neural substrates of consciousness, holding a valve open. With the help of a colleague, Elena Duranti, she SADS-scanned the locus intensively over three days and showed that there was a loop between Glockner’s Isthmus and a site of episodic memory. So the faculty that had set humans above all other creatures was not in fact an entity but a link between two pre-existent functions, things that had existed apart for millennia – like Normandy and Sussex before the invention of the boat – until a chance mutation in an individual had provided a connection.
‘All quite Darwinian from then on,’ said Malik Wood. ‘The loop gave a temporary advantage to its first possessor and her offspring. So it was heavily selected for.’
‘I remember reading about the discovery at the time,’ said Sheila Rahm.
‘What’s convincing is the slight sense of anticlimax,’ said Wood. ‘After all these years of searching, not a priceless treasure – not even an entity, just a link. Boy, does nature love pairings. Our most basic requirement, water, is not even an element!’
‘You would know,’ said Parn.
‘So what I’m saying, ultimately,’ said Wood, ‘is that the Rossi–Duranti loop is quite clumsy. I mean, all credit to those who found it, but the faculty itself is intermittent. You are self-aware when you choose to be. But by far the biggest problem with the loop was that any genetic variation at the point of meiosis opened up the way to insanity.’
‘You’ve lost us, Malik,’ said Sheila.
‘OK. To oversimplify again. When you, or your cells, make a sperm, which some of us are doing at this very minute in this room, you recombine the genes you’ve inherited from both parents. Same thing with an ovum, though they seem to get made all at once. Each time, a different combination of Granny and Grandpa. It’s fabulously hygienic and good news for your offspring. But at a molecular level, it’s also very delicate. Single errors around any of the genes that code for the loop can lead to other sorts of consciousness. So the loop is not just a random neural accident, giving only intermittent powers. It’s worse than that. One single typo in its genetic blueprint or one misstep in the exchange of parental alleles jams open the door to psychosis. And that’s why Homo sapiens has the other defining feature. Madness.’
Lukas Parn stood up. ‘Thank you, Malik. I don’t know if everyone could follow that.’
‘As much as I need to,’ said Sheila. ‘But what I want to know is what has this to do with Number Seven?’
‘That’s a bloody good question,’ said Parn.
‘OK,’ said Malik Wood. ‘This bit’s easy. Romantic even. Picture a Neanderthal settlement somewhere in Europe. They’ve had a niche for hundreds of thousands of years. They’re few in number, but they’re a success. Through ice ages and geological upheavals. They have language, tools and some burial customs. One day a bunch of other humans – a little slimmer, darker, taller, but recognisable and attractive – rolls into town. Sapiens.’
‘Look out, it’s the Crazy Gang!’ said Lukas Parn.
‘Exactly,’ said Wood. ‘Here come these irresistible people. They have a way with them. They’re sexy, they do things a bit differently and in many ways better. Sharper weapons, whatever. The Neanders don’t know the new guys are also crazy. Most of them are fine. Imagine you’re a Neander. You don’t know that one in a hundred of these new guys hears the voices of people who aren’t there and believe their thoughts are dictated by the planet Zog. You don’t know that many of them will go demented in old age. Because you haven’t seen them get old. Most of them get killed by predators or die of disease before they reach that stage.’
‘This is a bit comic book. Could you be more scientific?’ said Delmore Redding.
‘Christ,’ said Wood. ‘I’m trying to keep it simple! In evolutionary terms there are probably immunity advantages that modern humans will get from Neanderthals, who’ve been in Eurasia for ever. Equally, modern humans will bring resistance to certain African diseases and pass those on to these old Europeans they’re now mating with. But there are probably two sides to the coin. Miss Neander may give Mr Sapiens a chance of getting paler skin and therefore a better shot at not dying from rickets or vitamin D deficiency, but she may also give him a susceptibility to viruses.’
‘I think I preferred it when it was less scientific,’ said Sheila Rahm. ‘Tell us about Number Seven.’
‘It appears from our studies that Number Seven has a different version of consciousness. It’s human, it’s sophisticated, it’s robust. But it’s different.’
Malik Wood looked round the suite. Each of the others was sitting still. Delmore Redding looked as if he wanted to speak but had decided to wait.
Savouring the moment, Wood drank some more water. Delmore Redding cleared his throat, but Wood held up his hand.
‘From a hundred SADS scans of the brain and from the enormous number of psychological tests done by Delmore’s staff, I can say that Number Seven has a high IQ by modern human standards. He went to a normal school and has just graduated from Cambridge. Or was it Oxford? Doesn’t matter. He has an additional or different sense. A kind of synaesthesia between sight and hearing which allows him to detect the proximity of other creatures. He may have other sense variations, including one or more senses that are not compounds of our own, but entirely different.’
‘Christ,’ said Parn.
‘It’s what we hoped,’ said Wood. ‘If the eye grew by minute adaptations over millions of years and gave us the whole idea of sight, imagine how other mutations could open up new fields of perception. Historically, we thought there were only five senses because we’d only developed five sense organs. Probably there are hundreds. If we had the right receptors, maybe space and time would not be a mystery.’
‘Is his sight receiving light from different parts of the spectrum than ours?’ said Redding.
‘Probably. As you know, we Sapiens can see only a small part of it.’
‘Christ, Woody,’ said Parn. ‘What else?’
‘In sensory terms,’ said Wood, ‘he seems unresponsive to music. Or most of it. That’s not necessarily genetic, of course, but it is suggestive. More important is this: in cognitive terms, he appears to lack the ability to make forward hypotheses.’
‘In simple English, please, Malik?’ said Sheila.
‘He doesn’t foresee consequences over any length of time. Of his own actions or the actions of others. He just doesn’t project forward outside a context. He was told as a kid that next door’s cat, who he used to play with, was dying, but was amazed to find it dead a week later. He also has no interest in art, or what you might call the human urge to reinterpret the world. To reflect our life back on itself in order to understand it better.’
‘Does he have empathy?’ said Sheila.
‘Yes,’ said Delmore Redding. ‘As much as you or me.’
‘But isn’t that a projection?’
‘Yes, but it has no time element,’ said Wood. ‘That requires a different function of the brain. And a link. Our old friend.’
‘OK, Malik. To summarise?’ said Parn.
‘The evidence of the scans and the tests is that he does possess Glockner’s Isthmus. But he does not have the Rossi–Duranti loop. Or rather, he has a different version of it. Instead of being a valve, he has a straightforward connection that stays open. And while one end, like ours, starts at Glockner, the other end is attached to a different memory site. More autobiographical, less episodic, which may explain the lack of temporal planning. So what we’re saying is that he is humanly conscious but in a more consistent way, with, so far as we can see, no corollary weaknesses. No susceptibility to delusions or to hearing voices.’
‘And which came first,’ said Parn, ‘his version or ours?’
‘Good question,’ said Wood. ‘My guess is that there was a loop, then a connection, then a loop again. But of course there was so much backwash between the continents, so much breeding between early humans in Eurasia and early Homo sapiens expeditions out of Africa over the millennia that it’s hard to map exactly. But it’s likely that a medium-primitive Sapiens version became embedded in a local Eurasian population and that the successful Exodus Event group of Sapiens thousands of years later may have had their genome refreshed with their own genes from earlier exoduses reinserted by their gene flow with Neanderthals.’
‘You’ve lost us, mate,’ said Parn. ‘But basically you’re saying that today a bloke in Siberia might be conscious in a slightly different way from one in Uruguay.’
‘I am. But I’m also saying that in no way is that a problem. Any more than saying one of them is two centimetres taller or has skin a couple of shades paler is a problem. As I said at the start, you can’t make a fetish out of minor differences.’
‘Yes,’ said Delmore Redding. ‘It may be illogical and wrong, but history is full of people who have exploited these unimportant differences. To evil ends sometimes.’
‘That’s true,’ said Wood. ‘But we’re scientists. The biggest genetic variation between any two humans on this planet is between two villages in the Congo ten miles apart. That’s a fact. Like bonobos and chimpanzees becoming different species when a river separated the original parent population. Either of our Congolese has more in common with a person from China than he does with his next-village neighbour. This is really important to understand. That’s why the discoveries we’ve made by way of Number Seven aren’t fuel for what they used to call “racists”. On the contrary, they are an overpoweringly strong argument for the celebration of difference.’
‘And as you told me once,’ said Parn, ‘the difference between you and me is thirty little things, between you and Sheila is sixty and between you and a male Neanderthal, ninety-six.’
‘That’s right,’ said Wood. ‘Those little things are called “amino acids”.’
‘And are we studying the hell out of those ninety-six?’
‘You bet we are.’
‘All right, everyone,’ said Parn, standing up. ‘That’ll do. You’ve all been present at a historic event. Even by the standards of the Parn. Keep it strictly to yourselves. Remember the confidentiality agreements you’ve signed. But enjoy. Be glad you were here.’
Parn sneezed explosively.
‘Thank you, Lukas,’ said Sheila Rahm.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Parn. ‘I think it’ll make a pretty interesting paper, Woody. I can see that FRS just round the corner. Number Seven’s going to make us all rich and famous. But you especially.’
Malik Wood drained his glass. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Though the paper’s going to take a bit of placing.’
‘I’ve found somewhere I think will take it,’ said Parn. ‘Peer-reviewed, but pretty broad-minded. Christ, they’ve even published Therese Williams.’