Maria pocketed the chip and left the cafe, not knowing whether to feel skeptical and pessimistic, or elated -- and guilty. Guilty, because Durham -- if he was genuine, if he honestly planned to pay her real money for this glorious, senseless exercise -- had to be a little insane. If she took this job, she'd be taking advantage of him, exploiting his strange madness.
+ + +
Maria let Aden into the house reluctantly; they usually met at his place, or on neutral ground, but he'd been visiting a friend nearby, and she could think of no excuse to turn him away. She caught a glimpse of the red cloudless sunset behind him, and the open doorway let in the hot concrete smell of dusk, the whirr of evening traffic. After seven hours cloistered in her room, reading Durham's notes for his Autoverse Garden of Eden, the street outside seemed strange, almost shocking -- charged with the two-billion-year gulf between Earth's equivalent moment of primordial fecundity and all the bizarre consequences.
She walked ahead of Aden down the entrance hall and switched on the light in the living room, while he propped his cycle against the stairs. Alone, the house suited her perfectly, but it took only one more person to make it seem cramped.
He caught up with her and said, "I heard about your mother."
"How? Who told you?"
"Joe knows one of your cousins in Newcastle. Angela? Is that her name?"
He was leaning sideways against the doorframe, arms folded. Maria said, "Why don't you come right in if you're coming in?"
He said, "I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do?"
She shook her head. She'd been planning to ask him how much he could lend her to help with the scan, but she couldn't raise the subject, not yet. He'd ask, innocently, if Francesca was certain that she wanted to be scanned -- and the whole thing would degenerate into an argument about her right to choose a natural death. As if there was any real choice, without the money for a scan.
Maria said, "I saw her yesterday. She's handling it pretty well. But I don't want to talk about it right now."
Aden nodded, then detached himself from the doorway and walked up to her. They kissed for a while, which was comforting in a way, but Aden soon had an erection, and Maria was in no mood for sex. Even at the best of times, it took a willing suspension of disbelief, a conscious decision to bury her awareness of the biological clockwork driving her emotions -- and right now, her head was still buzzing with Durham's suggestion for building a kind of latent diploidism into A. lamberti, a propensity to "mistakenly" make extra copies of chromosomes, which might eventually pave the way to sexual reproduction and all of its evolutionary advantages.
Aden pulled free and went and sat in one of the armchairs.
Maria said, "I think I've finally got some work. If I didn't dream the whole thing."
"That's great! Who for?"
She described her meeting with Durham. The commission, the seed.
Aden said, "So you don't even know what he gets out of this -- except not-quite-proving some obscure intellectual point about evolution?" He laughed, incredulous. "How will you know if you've not-quite-proved it well enough? And what if Durham disagrees?"
"The contract is all in my favor. He pays the money into a trust fund before I even start. All I have to do is make a genuine effort to complete the project within six months -- and if there's any dispute, he's legally bound to accept an independent adjudicator's decision on what constitutes a 'genuine effort.' The expert system I hired gave the contract a triple-A rating."
Aden still looked skeptical. "You should get a second opinion; half the time those things don't even agree with each other -- let alone predict what would happen in court. Anyway, if it all goes smoothly, what do you end up with?"
"Thirty thousand dollars. Not bad, for six months' work. Plus computing time up to another thirty thousand -- billed directly to him."
"Yeah? How can he afford all this?"
"He's an insurance salesman. If he's good, he could be making, I don't know . . . two hundred grand a year?"
"Which is one hundred and twenty, after tax. And he's paying out sixty on this shit?"
"Yes. You have a problem with that? It doesn't exactly leave him poverty-stricken. And he could be earning twice as much, for all I know. Not to mention savings, investments . . . tax dodges. His personal finances are none of my business; once the money's in the trust fund, he can go bankrupt for all I care. I still get paid if I finish the job. That's good enough for me."
Aden shook his head. "I just can't see why he thinks it's worth it. There are God-knows-how-many-thousand Copies in existence, right now -- running half the biggest corporations in the world, in case you hadn't noticed -- and this man wants to spend sixty thousand dollars proving that artificial life can go beyond bacteria?"
Maria groaned. "We've been through this before. The Autoverse is not Virtual Reality. Copies are not the human equivalent of A. lamberti. They're a cheat, they're a mess. They do what they're meant to do, very efficiently. But there's no . . . underlying logic to them. Every part of their body obeys a different set of ad hoc rules. Okay, it would be insane to try to model an entire human body on a molecular level -- but if you're interested in the way fundamental physics affects biology, Copies are irrelevant, because they have no fundamental physics. The behavior of a Copy's neurons doesn't arise from any deeper laws, it's just a matter of Some "rules for neurons" which are based directly on what's known about neurons in the human body. But in the human body, that behavior is a consequence of the laws of physics, acting on billions of molecules. With Copies, we've cheated, for the sake of efficiency. There are no molecules, and no laws of physics; we've just put in the net results -- the biology -- by hand."
"And that offends your aesthetic sensibilities?"
"That's not the point. Copies have their place -- and when the time comes, I'd rather be a software mongrel than dead. All I'm saying is, they're useless for telling you what kind of physics can support what kind of life."
"A burning question of our time."
Maria felt herself flush with anger, but she said evenly, "Maybe not. I just happen to find it interesting. And apparently Paul Durham does too. And maybe it's too abstract a question to qualify as science . . . maybe working in the Autoverse is nothing but pure mathematics. Or philosophy. Or art. But you don't seem to have any qualms about spending a year in Seoul, practicing your own useless artform at the Korean taxpayers' expense."
"It's a private university."
"Korean students' expense, then."
"I never said there was anything wrong with you taking the job -- I just don't want to see you get screwed if this man turns out to be lying."
"What could he possibly have to gain by lying?"
"I don't know -- but I still don't see what he has to gain if he's telling the truth." He shrugged. "But if you're happy, I'm happy. Maybe it'll all be okay. And I know, the way things are going, you can't afford to be picky."
Picky? Maria started laughing. Discussing this on Aden's terms was ridiculous. Durham wasn't stringing her along, wasting her time; he was absolutely serious -- his notes proved that. Three hundred pages -- months of work. He'd taken the plan as far as he could, short of learning the intricacies of the Autoverse himself.
And maybe she still didn't understand his motives -- but maybe there was nothing to be "understood." When she'd been immersed in his notes, there'd been no mystery at all. On its own terms, Durham's plan was . . . natural, obvious. An end in itself, requiring no dreary explanation rooted in the world of academic glory and monetary gain.