The Green Gene Read online

  And then his new colleagues in the section of the RRB known as the Laboratory had been equally friendly, and even a touch effusive. At first Humayan had thought that this was in recognition of his own calibre and achievements; but later he decided that it was a subconscious attempt to demonstrate that here, in the hub and power-house of racial research, men were scientists, free from any but objective considerations of a brown skin. He thought this a proper attitude. He was a scientist too, a counter of people.

  A new voice was muttering in the Glisters’ kitchen. He slid past and up the stairs, and found a note pinned to his door: “Sir, Please do not lock your door, or how can I be cleaning your room? Moirag McBain.” The writing sloped far to the right; the author had had two goes at spelling the word ‘cleaning’.

  Humayan took out a pencil from the array in his breast-pocket and wrote, “Thank you, but I will clean the room myself. PH.” He unlocked the door and went in. He had brought home a fattish cyclostyled folder which contained the rules and vocabulary of the big RRB computer, which he would henceforth be using; at a glance he had seen that it was an ingenious but quite complex extension of Algol; it was classified ‘Secret’ and no doubt they had expected him to keep it in his office and refer to it as he used his console; but he preferred to learn the whole thing off in one go, partly because this would simplify his work, but mainly because he knew it would enormously impress his new colleagues to find him on wholly familiar terms with the big machine next morning. He thought it would take him about five hours, provided he wasn’t interrupted.

  Almost at once he heard the faint scratching that seemed to mean Doctor Glister was at the door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  There was no answer, but the scratching continued, so he rose and opened the door to find Glenda poised on the landing with a pencil in her hand, looking not at all startled to find her writing surface suddenly removed from her. She had been adding graffiti to Moirag’s note: MAKE DIRT, NOT LOVE; BAN THE BRUSH; HOOVER MUST GO. Her imitation of Humayan’s script was quite good.

  “You will get me into trouble with the servants,” he said angrily.

  She grinned at him. Her eyes behind the lenses were sharp with malice. He snatched the note from the door and took it back into his room, where he rubbed out all her additions. It was some time before he could settle to the computer language again.

  He was hanging up his suit, his mind content as a snake in the sun after its big feed of figures, when he noticed a little beam of light from the back of the tiny cupboard; he had already worked out that the architect had designed one cupboard-space here, between his room and the next, most of which served the other side, leaving only this chimney-like space for his own clothes. Occasionally during his study a wash of music had seeped through the wall, but he had been too deep in concentration to consider it. Now a faint memory of busy drums and wailing voices told him whose room might lie beyond the chink. It was too high for his line of sight, so he very quietly removed his suits and placed a small pile of Statistical Journals on the floor of the cupboard. They gave him the necessary stature.

  Kate was in bed, lying on her stomach, reading a book; an eiderdown concealed her shape and when she reached out an arm to look at her bedside clock he saw that she wore banal striped pyjamas.

  He woke early, and told himself that there was no point in lying in bed, so he dressed and shaved and crept into the cupboard. She was still asleep; it appeared that she liked to sleep with an open window, for the draught through the spy-hole was thin and agonising. After five minutes his right eye was weeping uncontrollably, so he turned his head away and listened for the first sound of movement. To pass the time he ran unnecessarily through the computer language he had learnt the night before. It was all there, of course, stored as neatly and accessibly as any information in the big machine itself. Each time he forced his eye into the sword-like draught he found Kate still sleeping; but when at last she woke she yawned, looked at her dock, flung back the blankets, staggered to the window, closed the catch and washed and dressed out of sight. It was infuriating: and odd, too, that whoever had made the spy-hole—and it was clearly more than an accident—had thought it worth while if that was the sum of the performance.

  His eye wept all day, so that he had to close it and use only the left eye to consider the results output from his console. On the other hand his colleagues were properly astounded at his mastery of their difficult language. He began to contemplate a few minor sophistications that would help him with his work; and also to investigate as far as he could the nature and coding of the supervisor circuits stored at the heart of the big machine. This last was mainly inquisitiveness: the computer was in some ways a mirror of his own powers, and he simply wanted to know it better; but there was also the practical point that the supervisor circuits allotted priorities to all computations demanded of the big machine from consoles all over the building. They did this partly on the basis of the work involved in each demand, but partly on the importance in the hierarchy of the man who made the demand. Humayan saw no harm in working himself a few rungs up that invisible ladder.

  That evening there was a further note on his door: “Sir, I must clean your room. Herself has given the order.” He was trying to think of a firm but placating choice of phrase, which would not involve his taking the argument to Mrs. Glister, when a door opened on the far side of the landing.

  “I bet it wasn’t like that,” said Glenda. “I bet Moirag simply asked Mum if she was supposed to, and Mum said yes without thinking. I wonder what she’s up to— I have to clean my room, because she persuaded Mum it was character-forming.”

  “I do not wish to trouble your mother.”

  “Tell Moirag to go and jump in the lake then.”

  “I cannot do that.”

  “Which was why I suggested it. What are you having for supper?”

  “I have bought a tin of sardines and a tin of baked beans.”

  “Slurp, slurp. Is there enough for two? It’s ages till our supper and school lunch was ugh.”

  “Come in,” said Humayan uneasily. He unlocked his door and took the inadequate tins from his briefcase. He was hungry too.

  “It’s OK,” said Glenda. “I’ll nick some bread and bananas out of our kitchen. I’ll cook and you can wash up.”

  Glenda was a noisy cook, a banger, scraper and rattler. It took Humayan some time to realise that the new sound in the room was not emerging from the kitchen. As soon as he concentrated on it it became a man’s voice, harsh and steady. Nor was it a harangue from the gym-instructor; it came out of the cupboard. Kate had a man in her room, then, and he did not sound very pleased with her; it was impossible to imagine Doctor Glister addressing even the most errant daughter in those tones, minatory and implacable.

  Glenda came out of the smoke-filled kitchen-box with a spatula in her hand and stood by the cupboard with her head cocked on one side. Carefully she eased the cupboard door open, and at once the voice became clear for whole phrases together: “… the logic of power … I have received many letters … clear evidence … deliberate perversion of government statistics … an alien presence … Thames foaming with blood …” Regardless of the apparent meaning of the words the voice continued its monotonous, crashing rhythm, a surf of oratory breaking on the shores of rocklike minds. Glenda shut the door.

  “Stupid nit,” she said. “Playing it that loud.”

  “What was it?”

  “Where have you been—that’s the Druid Enoc. You’ve heard of him.”

  “Enoc ap Hywel? The Welsh leader? But he is in prison, surely?”

  “They got him out three months ago—where have you been?”

  “In India.”

  “Yes, but … anyway, he’s in Ireland now, and that’s an illegal record Dad smuggled home. You can get three months for just listening to it, and a couple of years for simply owning a copy.”
/>   “But your neighbours would surely not report you.”

  “No, of course not. But it isn’t like that. We’re all super liberals, OK? But we can only go on being super liberals and having super easy consciences provided nobody does anything. When Kate plays old Enoc that loud Mr. Ede is bound to hear it, next door, and start wondering what he’s going to say when the RRB Conciliators come and ask him whether he heard anything: he says No and he’s in trouble with the RRB, and that’s trouble; he says Yes and he finds himself a witness at Dad’s trial. Very unpleasant. It’s in the contract of lease, I expect, that you can do what you like in the Yard provided you don’t cause any unpleasantness. Do you want curry powder in your baked beans?”

  “I am not fussy.”

  “You’d better not be, with me cooking. I should have put it in first, I suppose. Well, here goes.”

  She had fried some bread, sliced the bananas and added them with the curry powder to the baked beans, poured that mess over the fried bread and draped the warmed sardines across the top. The blue haze of her frying swirled through the room, as it used to in the eating-place of the sprawling Bombay flat where Humayan’s mother’s sister spent all day at the stove to be able to feed her luscious mushes to twenty hungry cousins. The sharp and sweet and oily mixture on his plate now was much to his taste, but Glenda suddenly took the savour out of it by saying, “Just like home, I bet.”

  His nape prickled and he found it difficult to swallow his mouthful. She had taken her glasses off to eat, which she had not done on the night of his arrival. Now he could see how strong was the cast in her left eye—a sure sign of a witch.

  “It is very good,” he managed to say. “I believe your other neighbour is a journalist.”

  “Frank? He’s not quite as bad as the others—at least not that way. He writes for our sort of super liberal sort of paper, but he’s a real yellow to talk to.”

  “Yellow?”

  “Half-way to being green. He’s Kate’s boy-friend. You wanted her for yourself, I expect?”

  She stopped eating and looked at him, smiling. Her right eye held his, and her left seemed fixed on his forehead.

  “I? Good gracious me, no.”

  “You can’t have her, I’m afraid. Everybody wants Kate—even Dad, in his heart—but nobody can have her because she’s dead gone on Frank. She’s supposed to be looking for a job, but she’s not trying very hard because Frank doesn’t work mornings, and she likes to be about then.”

  She slid a sardine into her mouth in a deliberately meaningful way. A rush of thoughts stampeded through his mind: wondering what sort of man Mr. Francis Leary was; a mild disappointment, a familiar state, for he had had many disappointments in love and lust; residual hope, for the existence of one lover might provide a path for another, and Indian tales are full of episodes where one man impersonates another under cover of darkness; the waning of even that hope, with the certainty that Mr. Leary’s stature was likely to be detectably different from his, be the night never so dark; and returning doubt whether Glenda’s sardine had been as meaningful as he had supposed. She was very young. Perhaps she was just inventing excitements.

  “I’m sorry about Kate,” she said. “And you can’t have me either—I’m saving myself up for the great Minus One when he becomes plus.”

  “But you will be minus then, surely?”

  “Hell! Anyway, I’m going to kick Helen out of my church—she’s a heretic. She sang ‘Love Divine’ all through at prayers this morning, and when I ticked her off she said it was because she liked the tune. So she sang it in tune—or tried to. That’s heresy, isn’t it?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Great. Well I do say so. Look, I’ll go and nick that Enoc record, just so you can see it. Then when some super liberal tells you you don’t know anything about the set-up here, you’ll be able to say you’ve seen and heard an Enoc disc. There’s not a lot of them about. I can’t think where Dad picked it up.”

  He sat trembling on the bed. He understood now how she did it. When she took her glasses off her squint allowed her left eye to look straight through his skull into his own third eye, which everyone knows is the gate of the soul. He prided himself on not being a superstitious man, and so was glad to have arrived at a scientific explanation for the phenomenon, but he was still trembling when she returned with the record.

  It was like any other, except that a circle of white paper had been pasted over the original label, which in any case seemed to have been almost blank. Humayan turned it over in shaking hands, thinking that if the police or the Conciliators walked in now he would be liable for three months in prison. For politeness’ sake he peered closely at the white round in the centre, and at one angle could see that the original had held a line of careful script, too small to decipher, and three larger stamped letters which might be three Bs. He was glad to hand it back to Glenda, and gladder still when she left.

  The RRB had a strangely ill-balanced reference library. Many of the books were on locked shelves, but the Laboratory Controller supplied him with a special ticket entitling him to ask for the keys. He had formed a vague hypothesis which was just, he thought, worth a preliminary test and he wanted to see whether any usable figures were available for the previous expansion of the Green population, in the mid-nineteenth century, enough at least for him to construct a crude model and attempt a run-back. The books he needed seemed seldom to have been used, and the figures turned out to be hopeless guesses. But since he was down there he asked for and found a small shelf of books on British folklore, including several on witch cults.

  Every word he read confirmed his guesses; even apparently random frivolities, like the great Minus One, fitted in. He made notes, and comforted himself with the thought that the large sum of money his father had spent on his horoscope had been fully justified. While he was reading an oddity on the table caught his eye. He had left a sheet of paper lying across the title-page of one of the books, half-obscuring the mark of the RRB stamp so that only the tops of the three letters were exposed. They read, like that, as three Bs. So had the obscured stamp on the Druid Enoc’s record. The thought of that disc drew his mind to Kate’s room, and the reasons for her apathy over finding a job. He wondered whether she really did have a lover—certainly that might account for her look of lively delight. Luscious imaginings began to fill his mind, but the only physical effect on him was that his right eye started to weep most disconcertingly.

  He put the books away, and during the lunch hour went round to India House and persuaded an official there to send a cable in Hindi to his mother, asking her to dispatch him, instanter, a very powerful charm against witches. The official was perfectly understanding, both of the need and of Humayan’s wish that such a message should not pass through the machinery of this alien culture.

  III

  THE CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: I agree of course with the Hon. Member that Britain currently enjoys the highest standard of living in the Western World, but I totally reject the imputations in the phrase ‘cheap Celtic Labour’. The Celtic section of our society itself enjoys a far higher standard of living than any similarly situated people with whom comparisons can fairly be made. In terms of real income, for instance, the Indian tribes of the Brazilian forests are immeasurably worse off than …

  Humayan met Moirag for the first time on Saturday morning. He had made up his laundry-bundle and tidied away his sparse breakfast while the Hoover was mumbling at other carpets, and by the time it had reached Kate’s bedroom he had spread an array of papers across the little table and littered a few books round the floor. So he was ready for her.

  Even so he jumped at the sharp rapping on the door, though he was conscious of his own rectitude: Mrs. Glister paid this ignorant woman good wages, so it would be immoral to collude in her wasting her time watching Kate Glister and her lover through the spy-hole. He was a hard-working intellectual, and it was only jus
t that the lower orders of society should work equally hard at their far simpler tasks. His eye was still rather sore, so he put his sunglasses on before opening the door at the second rattle of knocking.

  She was a large woman, though hardly two inches taller than himself. But her breadth was prodigious, her hair as orange as a carrot, her face a viridian slab. Even his sunglasses did not diminish the shock of colour.

  “Now I’ll be cleaning your room … sir,” she announced. Her voice was deep, resonant and triumphant.

  “My room is clean, thank you,” said Humayan. “And I am working.”

  He stood slightly aside to let her see the panorama of papers, but she took the movement for an invitation to enter and he had to prance back into the doorway. They stood thus, chest to chest, so close that he could smell the brandy on her breath. Her look was queenly.

  “I must do my cleaning,” she said. “I know what my duty is.”

  “I have cleaned the rooms myself, and I must not have my papers disturbed.”

  “Herself gives the orders.”

  “I will speak to Mrs. Glister.”

  “I have spoken to her … sir. I have my orders.”

  She leaned forward slightly so that the enormous bulge of her bosom pressed against him. He knew at once he was fighting out of his weight.

  “Can’t you see I am working?” he said shrilly. She sniffed derision.

  “My work is important. It is for the Race Relations Board!”

  The blankness of her face convulsed.

  “You! Ye thowless wee blackamoor!”

  “You are not to speak to me in such terms,” he shouted. “I will not endure it! I will report …”