But he was letting his mind wander and was missing her answer.
“—Leeds. But of course on holiday I always went as far as my money would take me, and Amsterdam was one of my favorite cities.”
There was a radiance to her smile and a fire to her enthusiasm Pala had not seen before, and it pained him to see how much she loved those distant, exotic lands when he wanted her heart to be here, in Ganjapur. Yet why should it be? There she could walk through splendid palaces at will, while here she lived surrounded by dogs.
“Why did you ever return?” he asked her in a small voice.
She leaned back with a quiet laugh. “There I am just one of many molecular biology Ph.D.s. Here I can become a millionaire just for being a woman.”
He shrank as if someone had thrown ice water on him. Surely not Saira, too? It couldn’t be!
She laughed again, a bit sadly. “Well, actually, it’s more complicated than that, but that is the deciding reason. For myself, I might have stayed there, but I might also not have. This is my home, my family is here, and most important, life here is so full of dreams. Everything is brighter, bigger, more intense than the drab, bare facts of the Western world.” She glanced at him appraisingly. “Take you, for instance. You have enough fire just sitting there, talking, to ignite ten Englishmen.”
He blushed under his coffee-brown skin. In a world where they were both free, it would have been a compliment to dream about. But he lived in a world where he lay awake nights, and he wasn’t so sure. “Lucky Englishmen,” he said.
She threw her head back and laughed out loud. “Yes, well, I know what you mean,” she said, still chuckling as she settled back down. “Anyway, be all that as it may, it was the successful marriage of my older female cousin that first lifted my family out of poverty. They were Harijan, you know. I am the only other marriageable female, and my family is very definite that they want me to make an advantageous match.”
Palanniappam stared fixedly at the floor. He’d had no idea, even though he’d talked to her many times over the past four years. If her family had been Untouchables, and this was the first generation to taste prosperity, the pressure on her must be enormous.
“I don’t understand,” he said shaking his head. “There’s Trivanastra who owns the cellular plant,” he nodded toward a fellow standing by the samosa table with two women talking to him, “there’s Saruddin of S&A Financial Services, there’s Singh of Singh Agro.” You had to be someone to be admitted to these teas at all. “Any of them would probably give you everything he had.”
“Mmm,” she said. “There’s only one small problem. I don’t mind waiting for money for my family’s sake. But they have to wait for someone I like, for my sake. It appears to be vers’ difficult to satisfy both requirements.”
He looked at her sadly, and slowly shook his head. “Oh, Saira,” was all he could say. “Oh, Saira, Saira.” It suddenly occurred to him that she always came and talked to him when he was there.
“People here, people in so many countries, wanted nothing but boys,” he was continuing softly, almost to himself. “We were desperate for boys. We got what we desired and we got disaster. Now only the rich have children, and who knows but that may be an even worse disaster—”
Saira meanwhile, stood up and beckoned. “I think I want you to see something,” she said cryptically. He followed her as she headed toward her room. Discreetly, she pressed her commlink to request a chaperone, since entertaining a gentleman alone in her room would lead to endless speculation.
“Not a word of this to a soul, Pala. I’m getting the patents as we speak. Look,” she leaned toward the computer screen with singleminded intensity, oblivious to the chaperone who slid quietly into an armchair by the door. The screen showed rows upon rows of red, blue, green, and yellow lines as meaningless as modern art to Pala’s eyes. “Those two are identical! See that? Identical! The coding regions match perfectly, the introns are the same, even the tandem repeats—” She happened to glance at him and took pity on his blank stare.
“Remember when I found that sperm carrying an X chromosome have a different membrane protein from those with a Y? Well, I’ve designed two genes to make proteins that bond with the X- or Y-related membrane protein, and I’ve found a way to get that protein to embed itself in the vitelline layer!”
As always when his conversations with Saira got technical, Pala felt he was trying to read fine print off a speeding train. Luckily, this time he remembered the relevant facts she’d explained before. “So, since that outermost vitelline layer of the egg is the first one contacted by the sperm, you can choose which type of sperm binds with the egg?”
“Exactly,” she crowed triumphantly. “End of gender-balance problem!”
Pala stared at the hieroglyphic screen with its tremendous message invisible to the uninitiated. Could it really be? Was he looking at the end of Settlements? Of men-only parties? Of streets without a single woman on them? Was this little screen showing a sudden lifting of the death sentence on his whole vast land—and so many others? He felt a lingering doubt that the calamity brought on by cheap and effective gender selection could be cured by more of the same poison. It was true that no one was mad keen on sons these days, but now—
“Saira, now they’ll just have all daughters. If I were young enough to benefit, I might even feel it would be an improvement,” he smiled slightly to show this was a joke, “but, really, Saira…”
“Not at all,” she exclaimed, still alight with victory. “I’ve been following the work of Schuijvendaal on endangered mammal species. Do you realize just one regulatory gene is responsible for the size of litters?”
The train had just speeded up again, and the print had gotten smaller. He thought they were talking about gender selection?
“No, think about it, Pala,” said Saira, mistaking his fogged expression for doubt. “It could be a package: one engineered gene promoting twins through double ovulation—which helps mitigate the population crash we’re having with only 10 percent of the population female—and two others making these X and Y factors in equal amounts, so that children have to be born in gender-balanced proportions.”
“Ah,” he said. “I see,” but before he could begin considering the implications, she ran on.
“There is a problem, however, and you can help me with it.”
Pala leaned forward. Help Saira? Him? He felt foolishly delighted at the thought of being useful to her.
“To make enough copies of the genes for field trials—which I should get the OK for soon—I need ultra-pure template. That way I can be sure that the copies are right. The only way to be sure of pure template is to use a microgravity environment like SpaceLab—”
Pala blinked in surprise.
“Schuijvendaal has offered to take my sample up piggybacked on his, but he’s booked on a flight early next month and I was just thinking there’s no way I can get my samples to him by then….”
It took Pala a second to figure out his role in a space flight, then he beamed. “I’ll be delighted to carry your samples to Sch-, to Sh-, to the Dutch gentleman.” He didn’t even ask her why she didn’t simply send the samples by courier, but in the next breath she answered his thought.
“I’m worried about Veerapatram.”
That was the grand old man of the Indian Academy of Sciences, a proponent of uterine replicators as the solution to all their problems, and a ruthless critic of all other approaches. Saira had mentioned him before.