Perfect People

10

‘Compassion,’ John said.

Naomi, deep in thought, seated on a bench on the Promenade Deck writing her daily diary entry by hand into her iPhone, remained silent.

‘Compassion,’ John repeated, as if thinking out loud. ‘ Compassion. How do you define it – how does anyone?’

They’d discussed the genes relating to compassion for over an hour in this morning’s session with Dr Dettore and now, during their free time until the afternoon session, John and Naomi continued toying with the subject.

As the ship headed south the weather was improving noticeably. The air felt gloriously warm to Naomi, and the sea was the flattest she had seen so far. They would be alongside the quay in Havana, Cuba, at seven this evening, but Dettore did not want them to go ashore. It was a fuelling and provisioning stop only. It was crucial over the next month for Naomi to be as healthy as possible; there was no sense risking picking up a bug in a cab or a shop or a bar, he had already told them.

John stood up. ‘Let’s walk a little, darling, stretch our legs. The nurse said exercise would help ease the pain for you.’

‘I’ll try.’ She slipped her phone into her handbag and stood up. ‘What do you think Dettore meant that our child would grow up faster than ordinary children?’

‘I guess he’s implying because of the extra intelligence he’ll have.’

‘I don’t think we should guess anything, John. We need to be sure about everything. He talked about accelerated growth and maturity. We don’t want him being so different to other kids that he doesn’t have friends.’

‘We’ll review everything before we finalize anything.’

‘I’m going through those documents with a fine-tooth comb.’

With the breeze on their faces. they walked along the teak decking, past a muster station and an orange lifebelt printed with the ship’s name. Naomi was limping, her leg aching badly from this morning’s injection. She felt low today, and very vulnerable. Slipping her hand into John’s, into his strong, reassuring grip, made her feel a little better. She squeezed and felt him squeeze back.

They walked past a row of portholes and she peered at each of them in turn, trying to see in. But the glass was mirrored like every other porthole on the ship, and all she could see was her own reflection, her pale face, her hair tangled by the wind.

‘This secrecy thing is really getting to me,’ she said.

‘I guess if we were in any clinic on land, there’d be a lot of privacy. Also – it just feels as if it ought to be different because it’s a ship.’

‘I suppose. I just think it would be interesting to meet one or two of the other couples and compare notes.’

‘It’s a very private thing. Maybe other people don’t want to talk – perhaps we’d find it difficult to talk, too, if we did meet anyone.’

So far the only people they’d met on the ship, other than Dettore, were a doctor called Tom Leu, a pleasant, good-looking Chinese-American in his mid-thirties, whom Dettore had introduced as his senior medical assistant; the nurse, Yvonne; their chambermaid; and a handful of Filipino staff.

There had been no sign of the captain or any of the other officers, other than a voice through the tannoy system at nine this morning giving advanced notice of a crew safety drill. All access doors and gates to the bridge and crew stations and quarters were permanently locked off. Apart from their fleeting sight of the handsome couple they had jokingly called George and Angelina, there had been no sign of any other clients.

Taking a stroll late afternoon yesterday they’d seen the helicopter come in, then leave a short while later. It had hovered for some moments after take-off and John had just been able to make out a woman’s face through the darkened glass window. Taking a couple away who had changed their minds, they speculated.

‘Do you want lunch?’ Naomi asked.

John shook his head. He wasn’t hungry, but it wasn’t to do with the motion of the ship; it was the stress of worrying constantly about doing the right thing. Making the right decisions.

‘Me neither. Why don’t we sit out for a bit – it’s warm enough to sunbathe,’ Naomi said. ‘And have a swim? And try to talk this compassion thing through?’

‘Sure.’

A few minutes later, swathed in the clinic’s white towelling dressing gowns and daubed in suntan lotion, they made their way back outside and around to the stern. Naomi gripped the handrail to walk down to the pool deck, then stopped suddenly and turned to John.

George and Angelina were lying on loungers by the otherwise deserted pool. Tanned and beautiful, in sharp swimsuits and cool sunglasses, they were both reading paperbacks.

Moments later Naomi heard a click. Her eyes shot back to John, who was surreptitiously jamming something into his dressing-gown pocket.

‘You didn’t take a photograph?’

He winked.

‘That’s bad. You shouldn’t, you know the rules. We could get thrown off if you-’

‘I shot from the hip. Nobody saw.’

‘Please don’t take any more.’

They walked over to a couple of loungers near them. ‘Hi!’ John boomed cheerily. ‘Good afternoon!’

For some moments there was no reaction at all from either of them. Then, very slowly, the man they had nicknamed George lowered his paperback a few inches, then, equally slowly, he inclined his head a fraction, as if to confirm the source of the greeting. His expression did not change and he returned to his book, giving them no further acknowledgement. The woman did not move a muscle.

Naomi shrugged at John. He opened his mouth as if to say something further, then, appearing to think better of it, peeled off his dressing gown, went to the edge of the pool and dipped a foot in.

Naomi joined him. ‘Friendly, aren’t they?’ she hissed.

‘Maybe they’re deaf.’

She sniggered. John climbed down into the water and began to swim.

‘How’s the water?’ she asked.

‘Like a sauna!’

Naomi tested it gingerly with her foot, remembering that John was used to freezing lakes in Sweden. His idea of warm was anything that didn’t have ice floating in it.

Ten minutes later, when they emerged, George and Angelina had gone.

Naomi lay on her lounger, pushing her hair back and wringing out the water, letting the heat of the sun and the warm air dry her body. ‘I think that was incredibly rude,’ she said.

Towelling his head, John said, ‘Maybe Dettore should insert a politeness gene into their child.’ Then, sitting down on the edge of Naomi’s chair, he said, ‘OK, we need to get our heads around compassion – we have to get it resolved by three o’clock – that gives us an hour and a half.’ He stroked her leg, then ducked his head down impulsively and kissed her shin. ‘You haven’t sucked my toes for a long time – remember you used to do that?’

‘You used to suck mine, too,’ she grinned.

‘We’re getting too middle-aged!’

Then, looking at him a little wistfully, she asked, ‘Do you still fancy me as much as you used to?’

Caressing her navel suggestively, John said, ‘More. It’s the truth. I love the way you look, the way you smell, the way you feel when I’m holding you. When I’m apart from you, if I just think about you I get horny.’

She lifted his hand and kissed each of his fingers in turn. ‘I feel the same about you, too. It just gets better with you all the time.’

‘Let’s concentrate,’ he said. ‘ Compassion.’

‘And the sensitivity part as well,’ she said. ‘Look, I’ve just been thinking in the pool-’

‘Uh-huh?’

Dettore had this morning presented them with modifications that could be made to the group of genes responsible for compassion and sensitivity. John saw compassion as a mathematical equation. You had to find the balance between where compassion was a crucial part of your humanity and where, through excess, it could threaten your survival. He told Dettore it was a dangerous area to try to change. The geneticist had disagreed strongly.

Composing her thoughts carefully, Naomi said, ‘If you and another soldier were travelling through a jungle, being pursued by an enemy, and your buddy was wounded suddenly, too badly to carry on walking, what would you do?’

‘I’d carry him.’

‘Right. But you wouldn’t be able to carry him very far, so then what do you do? If you leave him, the enemy will capture him and kill him. If you stay with him the enemy will kill both of you.’

John craved a cigarette suddenly. He’d quit when Naomi quit, after she fell pregnant with Halley, then had taken it up again for a short time after Halley died. He hadn’t had one now for eighteen months, but whenever he felt stressed, that was when he really wanted one.

‘The Darwinian solution, I suppose, would be to leave my friend and continue,’ he replied.

‘Isn’t the whole point of this, our whole reason for being here, to take charge of the future of our child ourselves – to not let him be a prisoner of haphazard random selection? If we did agree, God forbid, to messing around with his brain genes – as Dr Dettore keeps encouraging us – and we succeeded in designing a smarter human being, wouldn’t he be better at problem-solving than we are? Wouldn’t he know the answer to this?’

‘We’re trying to make a healthier person who will have a few added advantages – that’s all you and I can do,’ John said. ‘We can’t make a better world.’

‘And if you were going to mess with his brain, you would vote for ticking the box for the kind of genes that would have this advantaged person abandon his friend to the enemy and move on?’

‘If we were serious about wanting him to be a high achiever, he would have to be able to make hard decisions like that and be able to live with them.’

Naomi touched his arm and looked up at him, searching his face. ‘I think that’s terrible.’

‘So what’s your solution?’

‘If we were really going to reconfigure our child’s mind, I’d want him to grow up with a value system that has much more honour than anything we are capable of understanding at present. Wouldn’t that be a truly better person?’

John stared across the empty loungers towards the deck rail, and the ocean beyond. ‘What would your better person do?’

‘He’d stay with his friend and be comfortable with his decision – knowing that he could never have lived with himself if he’d gone on alone.’

‘That’s a nice way to think,’ John said. ‘But a child programmed like that would have no future out in the real world.’

‘That’s exactly why we’re right not to tamper with the compassion and sensitivity genes at all. We should just let Luke inherit whatever ones we have, at random. We’re both caring people – he can’t go too far wrong having our genes for these things, can he?’

A deck hand walked past them, holding a toolbox, oil stains on his white jumpsuit. Genetic underclass. Dettore’s words echoed in his mind. In Huxley’s Brave New World they bred worker drones to do menial jobs. That’s what children of the future were destined to become if their parents did not have the vision to alter their genes.

And the courage to take hard decisions when they did so.