“There’s a reception tonight at seven,” Springer was saying. “And you’re welcome to join us for dinner before that.”
“You are very kind,” Pala thanked her. His mind having thawed enough to start working, he suddenly remembered something. “Eh! You must be the Karen Springer who is in the same symposium with me?”
“That’s right.” Her face crinkled into a cute, apple-cheeked smile. “The one from the all-female family.”
“An entirely female family…” Pala mused, boggling quietly to himself at the thought. “I wonder if it would be something like growing up in Siva?”
“Is that a Settlement? I’d love to talk to someone from there. But any single-sex upbringing must have common elements. Did you find that you idealized women? Which expectations did subsequent experience show were wrong?”
Pala shook his head dubiously. “I don’t know. I haven’t had any subsequent experience. And I didn’t really grow up without women. My father’s five older sisters were always around, and my mother lived with us.” It feels so long ago now, thought Pala. “Anyway, I could easily give you the address of a woman who lives in Siva.”
“That’d be wonderful,” Karen Springer nodded happily, handing him her commlinker. As Pala tapped in Saira’s address, he had the disorienting sensation of being in two places at once. One tap at the “send” instead of the “store” button, and he’d be talking to Saira as if he were back in the Settlement’s drawing room, breathing the heavy air laden with smoke from cooking fires and the smell of old furniture dying in the heat. However, he didn’t tap the “send” button, though for one wild moment he considered it. For an unattached male or female to send an unexpected communication to a member of the opposite sex amounted to a declaration of love. Pala doubted Saira would appreciate such pushiness on his part.
“On your left,” Mbalavu was saying, “is the Rijksmuseum. You must visit it before you leave. Not far from here is also the Stedelijke, where they have a number of van Goghs.” The car rattled about on cobblestone streets, its electric motor whining now and again as it climbed the steep but short incline of a bridge crossing a canal. “We’re thinking of gathering for dinner at about five in the lobby, which gives you about three hours till then.” Mbalavu stuck his head out the window and let out an earsplitting whistle for the bellboy as they rolled up to the hotel.
In a moment there was an answering whistle, only slightly less fearsome, and a diminutive bellboy strode up.
“Deze keer heb jij gewonnen, kleintje,” said the little chap, pointing at the big Fijian towering over the car.
Mbalavu’s teeth gleamed in a huge smile. “Ahh. I think he said I won that time.” Then, looking a bit dubious, he added, “I also think he called me ‘Tiny.’ ”
Taking only the time to wash and hang up his packed clothes, a scant hour later Pala was back out on the windy street, making his way to Schuijvendaal’s lab in the Amsterdam Free University. Turning his map this way and that, he hurried down one of the smaller streets leading away from the square in front of the Palace, and soon came out on a canal lined with cobblestone streets, trees, and centuries-old houses. Pala peered surreptiously into the cozy interiors, with patterned carpets on the floor, lace antimacassars on the antique couches and armchairs, and plush rugs on the tables. Elaborate chandeliers were lit in some apartments even in the middle of the day, because the clouds were so thick. Pala wondered whether the Sun ever came out here.
The small streets were by no means crowded, but there was a steady stream of pedestrians, bicyclists, and the occasional car. Men and women went about their business, or traded greetings and conversation, or sat on benches along the canal enjoying the quiet melancholy of fall. There was a pervasive air of peace, and normality, and predictability that permeated this place. You did not turn the corner to find a homeless beggar talking to his god. There were no homeless beggars. Nor did you see guards at the gates of the walled compounds of the rich. The glass of these houses could be broken with a simple stone. Nor did you come upon the funeral of a man killed for his wife. There were plenty of wives.
Briefly, Pala felt the foreign life as if it were his own, as if he had grown up in it. He would not be likely to die alone; it would not even occur to him to worry about it. His iife and his mind would not have to sidestep desires, and his meditations would be free of the burden he could never quite shake. He would be free to feel like he felt now, pleasantly enjoying the place and the people, with nothing particular on his mind. Like he felt, he thought to himself with a wry smile, after he got himself a suit of long underwear.
Once he found the building, finding a specific lab in it was almost as difficult. However, perseverance won out, and soon Pala was shaking hands with a large, pink, jovial scientist in a large labcoat, with bushy eyebrows and matching wispy hair ringing his bald head. Pala was again tripping over Dr. Sch—, Dr. Sk—, Dr. Sh—
Dr. Schuijvendaal was looking at Pala’s card and saying, “Very pleased to meet you, Meneer Veenda,” pronounced the Dutch way to rhyme with ‘rain-da,’ when he noticed his visitor’s difficulty. Smiling he said, “Klaas is easier, I think.”
Pala nodded and suggested “Pala.” “You received Dr. Satnam’s message?” How strange it felt to say her name so formally.
Saira’s colleague nodded. “Everything is ready. Have you the vials… ?” Pala took out three tiny clear plastic tubelets, half the size of his thumbnail, containing nothing visible. Saira had explained to him that the desiccated, stabilized DNA was in there, but he still found it hard to take on faith.
“Ahh,” said Dr. Schuijvendaal looking at the tiny tubes in his palm, “so this is it. The end of an era.” He dropped the tubes into wells and handed them to his lab tech for shipment to the launch site. He turned back to Pala. “And which vector will Dr. Satnam for the finished product use? Mosquitoes, I would imagine?”
Pala knew enough to guess that he was talking about how the engineered genes would be inoculated into people. He hadn’t really thought about it. He’d just assumed it would be one of the usual methods: dermal patch, nasal spray, or injection.
“Mijn hemel, nee!” laughed Schui-jvendaal when Pala suggested this. “Then you would have to wait till people to their senses came. You have not the time for that, no?”
He had a point, but Pala was disturbed. Gender choice had to be taken away, yet he would not want to be the one to explain it to people suddenly deprived of it. Was this really what Saira was planning? Mosquitoes, fleas, gnats, horseflies—Saira could probably command them all with her magic. What, exactly, was he helping here?
He left the lab far more preoccupied than when he’d arrived, and he got lost on the way back.
With considerable concealed trepidation he approached the only person on the street, a woman. She gave him directions, but so briefly as to be almost rude, and he heard her muttering under her breath as she turned away. “Surround the lot with barbed wire until they’re finally dead from their precious maleness. Can’t even walk in my own country without being harassed.”
She muttered it in English too, just to be sure he heard her.
Pala opened his mouth to protest that his motives were not at all ulterior, but she was already marching away and he gave up. He stared fixedly at the melancholy autumn trees, but he was no longer a tourist in an exotic place. He was an undesirable alien. He couldn’t stop trying to prove to himself that he was nothing like the foreign woman’s picture of him. “It’s not as if I’m thinking of sex every time I see a woman,” he thought as he deliberately concentrated on one of the many women on the busier street where he had come out. But it was no good. It was as if he had told himself not to think of pink elephants. Soon he could think of nothing else.