The Green Gene Read online

  Mr. Mann had clasped Humayan’s hand at the beginning of this speech and held it to the end. He had a grip like iron.

  Half-way through the morning his telephone rang. It was the official at India House, speaking in a very friendly fashion and saying that there was an answer to his telegram waiting for him. He walked round during the lunch hour and picked the message up. It said: “FIRST CLASS MANTRA AGAINST WITCHES IN PREPARATION STOP MEANWHILE ADVISED FOLLOWING FORMULA EFFICACIOUS QUOTE DA NARA DA GABA DEE END QUOTE REPEAT AS NECESSARY STOP YOUR EVER LOVING MOTHER.”

  Uncle Prim had had a hand in that. Efficacious was his favourite word, representing for him that unattainable Eden where gadgets worked and money-making schemes made money.

  The rest of his lunch hour Humayan spent in the RRB library. The books on Ogham came from a locked case and were smudgy with use. He found it was an absurdly primitive script—you drew a horizontal line right across the page, and the first five letters were lines branching vertically up from this, one line for B, two for L, three for V and so on. The next five letters were a set of similar lines branching vertically down; the next five were slanting lines cutting right through the line; and the five vowels were vertical lines also cutting right through. Twenty clumsy letters, plus five even clumsier squiggles for seldom-used characters. So the mark on Mr. Leary’s shoulder-blade was an H followed by a little cross, not in the alphabet, followed by either R or Ng (with this last letter the scars had run into each other, so it was difficult to tell whether there had been four lines or five). But as the central line was vertical, you could turn your head the other way and read the symbols differently—R or Ng, then the little cross, then B. It meant nothing to Humayan, other than being a menacing bit of mystery attached to the man who was going to interview him that evening.

  At work that afternoon he paid very little attention to the goals at which he had been told to aim. He had early discovered that for a scientist to produce the results his masters desire it is no use his falsifying his processes; some other scientist will gladly publish a paper pointing out the error. Humayan had done this himself, in the past. The first essential is to discover the truth, because until you do that neither you nor your masters know where falsification can safely begin. So he worked in his usual way, steadily quartering the vast jungle-tracts of figures, with his Telex like some hound or shikari obedient at his side, but all the time with his mind alert for the crack of a betraying twig that would release him to plunge along the random trail of fleeing truth. That day he discovered nothing he did not already know; but towards evening, just as he began to cross-file his material on his own system that allowed him to use the memory-store of the big machine in the basement as two extra dimensions of interrelation, he began to be teased by the notion that if he went on for a few hours more a twig would snap. He sighed. He had this appointment with Kate’s lover. Glenda would not be pleased if he missed that.

  He sighed again as he locked the Telex rigid for the night, so that it could not be tampered with. All the machines in the building had locks, and locking them had been the only subject about which the Director had been less than vague during his interview with Humayan. All input and output devices must be locked when not in use.

  Mr. Leary’s living room was exactly the same shape as the Glisters’ but totally different in feel. Its plush mess was dominated by a large poster taped to one wall, which showed a vivid green face, a priest’s habit, and an arm with a green hand pointing straight at the viewer. Beside the figure was printed, “Your Church Needs You.” Humayan, orange juice in hand, stared at this poster. It awoke vague memories.

  “That is a recruiting slogan for the first war against Germany, I believe,” he said.

  “You misbelieve,” said Mr. Leary, turning from the drinks-cupboard with a glass in his hand. “It’s a steal from an English recruiting poster, but it’s Irish, 1921. The English got right out of Ireland then, only too glad to go, now there was no money in agriculture, and left the Irish to fight it out among themselves, Prots in the north against Papists in the south. They’re still at it. It’s a bloody shambles, and that’s how it’s going to stay. They’ve achieved a balance of blood, killing each other off exactly as fast as they breed. You should see some of the stuff that comes on to our news-desk from Dublin—we don’t use much of it because it’s so bloody monotonous, but every so often we run a small story, just to remind readers that everything’s a bit worse somewhere else. Cheers.”

  Still standing he sniffed disconsolately at his whisky, then drank it as if it were water. Humayan hovered, dubious where to settle. Mr. Leary seemed to own only one armchair, a thing like a shapeless bale, as though an explorer had discovered a mammoth frozen into a glacier, had cut it into sections and packed them in old chintz to ship home, and one section had arrived in this room to add its ambiances to all the male-smelling clutter.

  “No, don’t sit down,” said Mr. Leary, whacking his rummer on a bookshelf. “I’m not going to wait for this bloody photographer any longer—I’ll get a pic of you somehow. What I want to do is stroll up to the Green Zone for a bit of local colour—I listen better on the hoof, too. OK?”

  “I have an RRB pass now. Mr. Mann gave it to me.”

  “Dick? Boy, did you go to the top? What did he say about the interview?”

  “He was pleased with the idea. I thought you would know from telephoning him.”

  “I forgot. Sorry. Overslept, you know.”

  The battered face smiled with sudden vehemence, as though all future happiness depended on Humayan both believing Mr. Leary and forgiving him. What if Mr. Mann himself had said the opposite? Humayan respected a certain secretiveness, and washed by that smile it was easy to ignore the lie, even for one who knew just what form Mr. Leary’s oversleeping took.

  After a week in England Humayan had still not become used to the lingering brightness of northern evenings; he felt that dusk by now ought to have been seeping its brown tones into the shadows, and was shocked to see the lobelias in the yard still as garish a blue as they had been at noon.

  In the alley beside the inn they met a green postman carrying a moderate-sized but obviously heavy parcel. “That for me?” said Mr. Leary.

  “It is, son,” said the postman.

  “Great. I’ve been waiting for that. Hang on a second, Pete; it’s some books I need.”

  The postman rolled his eyes to heaven as if shocked by the notion that anyone should actually need books. Mr. Leary took the parcel from him and went back into the Yard. Humayan followed the postman out on to the pavement and watched him adjust his bicycle dips and ride away on a ramshackle old delivery bicycle. His cap was too large for him and he had to cycle with one hand holding it to his scalp. Mr. Leary took a few minutes to reappear, but made no apology.

  They walked together towards the Green Zone. Their paces did not match, but subconsciously both tried to adapt to the other’s, Humayan stretching towards Mr. Leary’s natural lope, and Mr. Leary contracting to a mincing gait which assorted ill with his coarse muscularity. At first it was a very silent interview, with Mr. Leary simply humming and thinking. In the subway that divided Zone from Zone the mysterious slogan had been painted out, but a new one splashed in over the obliterating paint.

  “Ogham,” said Mr. Leary.

  “Yes, I know. I can read the letters but not the language.”

  “Can you just? When did you learn that?”

  “Oh, ah, I saw two youths painting a slogan and I was inquisitive, so I read it up in the RRB library. It is a very easy alphabet to learn; I read it through and I knew it.”

  “Well, if I were you I’d unlearn it. In a society like ours you find the cops are just as much prey to fashion as novelists or well-dressed women—they take it into their heads to crack down on this or that bit of Celticry on no rational grounds. Probably somebody wrote a slogan on some senior cop’s garage doors, and it all began there.
Anyway, they’re very hot on it just now, so … Hell, we’d better get on with the job—let’s start with your work in India.”

  His questions were shrewd and coherent, but superficial. He seemed to have no interest in the inwardness of things. But he was a good listener and seldom failed to follow a train of argument. From time to time he would stop, lean his note-pad against a peeling wall and write down a key phrase. Humayan noticed while he was doing this that his hands had the same bashed-about appearance as his face; none of the fingers lay really parallel and the top joint of his left index finger was bent almost at right-angles to the rest of it. He took a path that led through a very drear district, not such as Humayan would have chosen to wander in, though the houses, when you looked at them, turned out to have much the same basic architecture as the spruce Victorian residences round Horseman’s Yard. Once there had been here, too, neat plaster mouldings along cornices and over pillared porticoes, but these had long fallen away. Whole façades were black with the smoke of sea-coal; most windows were broken, and woodwork paintless; occasional houses were better preserved, but painted such curious colours that Humayan guessed the paint must have been a cheap job-lot, or stolen by workmen at some building-site. But the weighty architecture, the decay, gave most of the houses the look of those crumbling mausoleums in the British cemetery in Bombay.

  The evening was full of the sweet, damp reek of uncollected garbage; dirt-smeared small children played unfathomable games along the pavements, glanced up with a flicker of eyes at the sound of footsteps, stared, then returned to their mysteries. A few green men lounged around in twos and threes. At one point a man came walking along the pavement towards them with his fawn shirt all covered with blood, and his nose cut and swollen.

  “Are ye daein’ weel, Jock?” shouted a man in a doorway.

  The bleeding man stopped and pouted his crimson chest.

  “’Tis nae coward blude,” he called. “’Tis nae coward blude.”

  The man in the doorway answered indecipherably, and the bleeding man turned and stumped on with the sturdy, straddled gait of the confident drunk; but every ten yards he stopped and shouted back to the man in the doorway, “’Tis nae coward blude.” Increasing distance gave his call a more and more questioning tone, as though the original axiom was becoming dubious.

  Humayan began to feel that they were never out of earshot of a crying baby. Unlit basement windows flickered bluely with TV. Silent women leaned from upstairs windows. All the police were green, armed, paired and stolid; but Mr. Leary knew them all by their first names so Humayan never had to produce his pass. Their pale eyes swept over him without one gleam of interest.

  He was careful, in telling his story, to riddle it with technicalities, some of which Mr. Leary wrote down. This was partly to impress the reporter with his intellectual stature, but mainly to make his actual work seem important but impossible for a layman to follow. He did not intend to make again the mistake he had made with Kate, claiming an achievement both large and simple. Mr. Leary seldom tried to clarify these obfuscations; his main interest was in likely practical results, and he was impatient of the notion that until you understood the cause you could not expect to predict the effects. After a while he switched ground, and began to try to turn the whole interview into a human-interest story. The change came at a point when Humayan was talking about a self-multiplying aberration common to the absorption curves of exiled populations of moderate sizes. Mr. Leary grunted and waved a battered hand at the townscape.

  “You’ve seen this sort of thing in India, I suppose,” he said.

  They had come to a point where an elevated throughway moved in scooped and cantilevered arches above the roof-lines and then flowered into the great concrete petals of an interchange. Below this was a cleared space, vaguely grassed, where stood three smashed saplings and a children’s climbing-frame, uprooted, on its side. In the light breeze bits of paper flopped a few feet, lay still, flopped on; the supply was endless. The sun had set now, and the spies of darkness were gathering under the arches; in one such shadow half-a-dozen fourteen-year-old boys had cornered a couple of girls; the jeering note of the backchat modulated a stage, the boys’ voices becoming more confident, more eager, the girls’ more irritably resigned. Two passing policemen took no notice; around the arena the dark houses had their backs turned on the scene, showing bustles of shambling huts and outside lavatories, and roofs patched with old doors and corrugated iron. Overhead the sleek traffic hustled to cosier zones.

  “Oh, we have miles of cities much worse than this,” said Humayan airily. “It is a pity, but nothing can be done. These people here do not know how lucky they are.”

  An electric tocsin clamoured under the arches and drowned Mr. Leary’s answer. It rang for half a minute, and as it ceased one of the policemen turned and shrilled his whistle and shouted to the boys, who broke like startled birds and ran away down alleys. The two girls, only a little dishevelled, walked across the grass gossiping angrily.

  “Saved by the bell,” said Mr. Leary.

  “What happened?”

  “Ten-minute warning for curfew. There’s another in five minutes, and then the real thing. After that, if you meet a cop who feels like target practice … oh, you’d be all right, with your pass, provided he gave you time to show it. Let’s go. I’ve got all I want, but it’s going to be a hell of a story to lick into shape.”

  Humayan scuttered beside him as he strode rapidly back through the dismal streets; they were still in the Zone when the real bell sounded, but the policemen they met after that answered Mr. Leary’s “Good night” with a casual grumble. Humayan assumed that the journalist had exaggerated the dangers. It was what he would have done himself. Not far inside the Saxon Zone they came to a railed playground, with elaborate edifices for climbing and swinging, and a sandpit. Mr. Leary stopped here, though the gate was locked, and contemplated the sculpture-like shapes.

  “We are living in the last days of the world,” he said suddenly.

  “I think the world has seen many last days,” said Humayan. “You are lucky on this island, a rich, easy, people. Your nightmares are things which other races take for granted. When they begin to become a little real, you think it is the end of the world.”

  Mr. Leary made an impatient gesture, then looked at his watch as though the end of the world was late.

  “How may famines have you seen?” said Humayan.

  “That’s not the point,” muttered Mr. Leary, but seemed not to wish to argue what the point was. They stood in silence looking at the empty playground. Slowly, as if had been waiting its cue, the dimming air trembled with a slow, deep thud, like an earthquake whose shock wave has travelled through the air.

  “Hell, that was a big one!” said Mr. Leary. “They’ll have to let me report that. But do you know what the News Editor will say? ‘Play it down, Frank, old boy. Play it down.’ Come on. I’ve got to go and phone the office.”

  Glenda was lying on Humayan’s bed, bespectacled, reading a school Hamlet. He was still feeling important, a man of consequence, and was irritated to see her thus in possession.

  “Da Nara Da Gaba Dee,” he mouthed.

  “It’s all right, I’m just going,” she said, shutting her book.

  It worked! It worked! He began to fiddle with the buckle of the little collar. She took off her spectacles, as if weary of the feel of them on her face, and looked at him. Looked into his middle eye.

  “What did you find out about Frank?” she asked.

  “Not very much. A senior official in the RRB says his heart is in the right place. The mark on his shoulders is Ogham. One of the letters is H or B, and the other is R or Ng. He thinks we are living in the last days of the world. It seems to me that at some time in his life he must have been tortured, and then branded. Perhaps more than once. A big parcel came for him just as we left for our walk. The postman … ”

  “
Postman! At half past six!”

  “Yes, and his bicycle was not of official pattern, I think, and his hat was much too big for him.”

  “What on earth? Drugs, Pete?”

  “Far too big. I thought perhaps illegal pamphlets.”

  “If we could find out … Anyway, I’ve had a foul day. I was kept in late for sacrificing cockroaches to the Great Minus One. We were going to dissect them anyway, so I couldn’t see any harm in sacrificing them first, but Miss Frankins wouldn’t see it. Helen was sick. What are you going to do now?”

  “I am going to visit my friend Mr. Palati’s restaurant and eat a very hot curry.”

  “Oh. All right. Enjoy yourself.”

  She moved out of the room with her curious clumsy glide. He locked the door and stood for a moment considering. The charm had worked, for a moment, but then she had overcome it by exerting her full powers. Still there was virtue in the charm, however weak; perhaps in her absence it would counteract the power of the dog-collar. He undid the buckle and settled down at the table to write the words along the inner surface of the leather.

  The collar had an ornamental line of stitching running between the brass nodules; this went right through the leather, forming a single horizontal line along the centre of the reverse side. He stared at it. This too was meant, planned from the beginning by his protecting planets. His hands shook as he unzipped the compartment at the back of his wallet and drew out the carbon copy of his horoscope that he kept there, two flimsy sheets of typescript brown with much fingering and worn at the folds almost to the point where they fluttered into separate rectangles. “… to travel into far lands … To be troubled with a witch. To face dangers. To acquire new wisdoms from old sages, and by these to overcome the dangers …”