“Genetics,” I said.
“Oh, you want to talk about it now, do you?” he said. He looked at the large guard who had accompanied him into the room and then taken up impassive station in the corner. “And you can fuck off,” he told the guard. The guard ignored him. Marcin tried to rub his eyes, but the chains pulled his hands up short. “Fuck,” he said.
“Genetics,” I said again. “I’m serious, Marcin. What have you done?”
He looked at me. His hair was longer than I remembered, and it was crumpled up on one side as if he’d been asleep when they came to bring him to the white room and they hadn’t given him any time to comb it. His eyes were red-rimmed and his nose was running.
“Mirek Sierpiński,” I said. “Tutu.”
He sighed and seemed to crumple a little in his jumpsuit. “Where does creativity come from?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well,” he said. He sighed again. “The science is complicated.”
“Don’t you dare patronise me,” I warned.
He shrugged. “There’s a genetic mutation which, basically, codes for creativity. A few years ago it was thought that about fifty percent of people carried it, but it turns out the figure’s a lot higher than that. Somewhere in the ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent. Everyone’s carrying the mutation. Pretty much.”
He paused, and I leaned forward slightly. “Marcin,” I said again, “what have you done?”
“Okay.” He tried to rub his eyes again, got pulled up short by the chains again, shook his head. He looked at me. “So everyone has the creative mutation — which also causes schizophrenia and psychosis in some cases, by the way — but the world isn’t flooded with artists. Why is that? Why didn’t Tutu’s parents pass the mutation on to her? Well, God help them, they did. But Tutu has another genetic mutation which…” He looked at me. “This next bit’s a little vague.”
“It’s better than nothing,” I told him.
He thought about it for a few moments. “There’s a mutation of another gene which makes people want to be creative.” He watched the look on my face. “I know, it doesn’t seem like a distinction at all, does it? But it’s an important one. Tutu, if we’re taking her as our model, has the mutation which makes her creative, like almost everybody, but she lacks the mutation which makes her want to do anything about it.”
“She’s been writing poetry,” I said. “It’s been in the papers.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Any good?”
“It’s some of the worst poetry I ever read.”
He looked at me strangely and, I thought, rather slyly. “Well, there you go,” he said. “Talent remains an unquantifiable thing, a complete mystery. Nobody’s found the mutation for that yet. But the impulse is there. I’ll bet you… oh, a lot of money that she doesn’t go to quite so many parties from now on. Have you got any paper?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Paper. Oh, never mind.” He looked at the guard. “Could I have some paper, please?”
The guard went over to a cupboard in the corner of the room, unlocked the door, and took out a pad of scrap paper, with which he returned to the table. Marcin’s chains just about allowed him to reach the tabletop and tear a sheet off the pad.
“What did you give me?” I asked.
He was folding the sheet of paper corner-to-corner and smoothing the crease down with his thumbnail. “Eh? Oh, the active ingredient was MDMA.”
“You gave me Ecstasy?”
“A mild dose. But very pure.” He unfolded the paper, folded the opposite corners across, and creased them down. “A really mild dose. Nobody would want to take it if it didn’t make them feel good. But the payload, the thing that gives the clocks their gong fu, is a virus.”
I was not even remotely unprepared for this. After the polite young man arrested me I had been taken to a rather grim building on the outskirts of town, not far from the airport, where I was told to sit in a room not unlike this one and I was questioned for almost fifty hours, singly and in groups of anything up to five, by a large number of people who were not polite at all. None of them actually came out and said it, but by putting all their individual questions and accusations together it seemed to me that they believed Marcin was guilty of releasing some kind of biological weapon and was now on the run.
Finally — I suspect they had found Marcin and arrested him, because we had not even begun to scratch the surface of places I might think he was hiding — I was led out of the room, down a corridor, out of the building and into a waiting taxi, which took me home. No one said goodbye or thank you or ‘don’t even think of going to the media about this,’ from which I gathered they were either very excited or very nervous now they had Marcin.
When the taxi delivered me at my building, there was a small crowd of artists and writers waiting around the front entrance.
“The virus rewrites your genome,” he went on. “It inserts the mutation which predisposes people to want to be creative.”
“You absolute bastard,” I said. “How dare you do that.”
He looked up from the sheet of paper, which had ceased to be rectangular and was now a frantically-complicated landscape of pleats and folds. “I thought it was worth a try,” he said.
“You thought it was ‘worth a try’?” I yelled with enough violence to make the guard shuffle his feet.
Marcin went back to the sheet of paper. “Do you know what the problem is with modern society?”
“Too many fucking scientists?” I said in a very loud voice.
He sniffled and shook his head. “Too much time on our hands. The human race is, on the whole, all right.” He looked at me. “We’re fine, Jarek. Nice people. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, most of us. But there’s a tiny percentage of people who are not fine. The world is not full of assholes, but the assholes run the world. They need something else to do.” He folded a corner of the thing he was working on into a pocket formed by two other folds and smoothed it down. “I’ve given them something else to do.”
“Hitler was a painter,” I said.
“Hitler was a maniac. He didn’t have the second mutation. He didn’t want to paint enough to stop him being a maniac.”
I glared at him. I kept glaring at him until he noticed and looked up from whatever he was doing with the sheet of paper.
“I had flu,” I said.
“That wasn’t really flu. That was your immune system trying to reach an accommodation with the virus,” he said. “You’ll have been fanatically infectious for the four or five days before your symptoms presented.”
“Bastard,” I said.
He smiled sunnily. “Relax,” he told me. “You were never in any danger. You’re quite unusual, having that reaction. Most people won’t even realise they’ve been infected until they start being creative.”
“I don’t feel creative,” I said.
His fingers paused in their manipulation of what I had long since ceased to regard as a simple sheet of paper. “That, Jarek, is because you’re immune,” he said. “You’re among a vanishingly-small percentage of the population who don’t have the original creative mutation.” He smiled at me. “I know, I know. You’ve done good work, good creative work. But you’ve done it despite being entirely undisposed to creativity. You’ve done it, effectively, by being a very good manager. Now, you think back and try and remember how much of that work actually originated with you, and how much originated with other people.”