The Calcutta Chromosome

* * *

one

If the system hadn't stalled Antar would never have guessed that the scrap of paper on his screen was the remnant of an ID card. It looked as though it had been rescued from a fire: its plastic laminate had warped and melted along the edges. The lettering was mostly illegible and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot. But a four-inch metal chain had somehow stayed attached: it hung down in a rusty loop from a perforation in the top left-hand corner, like a drooping tail. It was the chain that tripped the system, not the card.

The card turned up in one of those routine inventories that went flashing around the globe with metronomic regularity, for no reason that Antar could understand, except that it was what the system did best. Once it got started it would keep them coming, hour after hour, an endless succession of documents and objects, stopping only when it stumbled on something it couldn't file: the most trivial things usually.

Once it was a glass paperweight, of the kind that rain snow-flakes if you turn them upside down; another time it was a bottle of correcting fluid, from an irrigation overseer's office just south of the Aral Sea. Both times the machine went into a controlled frenzy, firing off questions, one after another.

Antar had met children who were like that: why? what? when? where? how? But children asked because they were curious; with these AVA/IIe systems it was something else--something that he could only think of as a simulated urge for self-improvement. He'd been using his Ava for a couple of years now and he was still awed by her eagerness to better herself. Anything she didn't recognize she'd take apart on screen, producing microscopic structural analyses, spinning the images around and around, tumbling them over, resting them on their side, producing ever greater refinements of detail.

She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen. He'd tried routing her to her own encyclopedias, but that wasn't good enough. Somewhere along the line she had been programmed to hunt out real-time information, and that was what she was determined to get. Once she'd wrung the last, meaningless detail out of him, she'd give the object on her screen a final spin, with a bizarrely human smugness, before propelling it into the horizonless limbo of her memory.

That time with the paperweight it had taken him a full minute to notice what was going on. He was reading: he had been lent a gadget that could project pages from a magazine or a book on the far wall of the room. So long as he didn't move his head too much and hit the right key in a steady rhythm, Ava couldn't tell that she didn't exactly have his full attention. The device was illegal of course, precisely because it was meant for people like him, who worked alone, at home.

Ava didn't notice the first time but it happened again with the correcting fluid: he was reading, staring at the wall when she went deadly quiet. Then suddenly warnings began to flash on his screen. He whisked the book away but she already knew something was up. At the end of the week, he received a notice from his employer, the International Water Council, telling him that his pay had been docked because of "declining productivity," warning him that a further decline could entail a reduction in his retirement benefits.

He didn't dare take any more chances after that. He took the gadget with him that evening, when he went on his hour-long daily walk to Penn Station. He carried it to the franchise doughnut shop where he was a regular, down by the Long Island Railroad ticket counters, and handed it back to the Sudanese bank-teller who had lent it to him. Antar's retirement was only a year away and if his pension rates went down now he knew he wouldn't be able to work them up again. For years he'd been dreaming of leaving New York and going back to Egypt: of getting out of this musty apartment where all he could see when he looked down the street were boarded-up windows stretching across the fronts of buildings that were almost as empty as his own.

He stopped trying to get the better of Ava after that. He went back to his job, staring patiently at those endless inventories, wondering what it was all for.

Years ago, when Antar was a boy, in Egypt, an archaeologist had turned up at the little hamlet where his family lived--on a strip of land reclaimed from the desert, on the western edge of the Nile Delta. The archaeologist was a woman, a very old Hungarian emigre with skin that was as brittle and closely veined as a dried eucalyptus leaf. No one could pronounce her name so the village children named her al-Magari, the Hungarian.

The Hungarian visited the village several times over a period of a few months. On the first few occasions she brought along a small team of assistants and workers. She'd sit in a canvas-backed chair, under an enormous hat, and direct the excavations with a silver-tipped cane. Sometimes she would pay Antar and his cousins to help, after school, or when their fathers let them off from the fields. Afterwards the boys would sit around in a circle and watch as she sifted through the sand and earth with brushes and tweezers, examining the dirt with magnifying glasses.

"What is she doing?" they'd ask each other. "What's it all for?" The questions were usually directed at Antar, for he was the one who always had the answers at school. The truth was that Antar didn't know; he was just as puzzled as they were. But he had a reputation to live up to, so one day he took a deep breath and announced: "I know what they're doing: they're counting the dust; they're dust-counters."

"What?" said the others, mystified, so he explained that the Hungarian was counting the dirt in the same way that old men count prayer beads. They believed him because he was the brightest boy in the village.

The memory stole up on Antar one afternoon, a brilliantly sunlit vision of sand and mud-brick and creaking waterwheels. He'd been struggling to keep himself awake while a particularly long inventory went flashing by. It was from an administrative building that had been commandeered by the International Water Council--some wretched little Agricultural Extension Office in Ovamboland or Barotseland. The Investigation Officers had run everything they could find through Ava, all the endless detritus of twentieth-century officialdom--paper-clips, file-covers, diskettes. They appeared to believe that everything they found in places like those had a bearing on the depletion of the world's water supplies.

Antar had never quite understood why they went to so much trouble, but that morning, thinking of the archaeologist, he suddenly knew. They saw themselves making History with their vast water-control experiments: they wanted to record every minute detail of what they had done, what they would do. Instead of having a historian sift through their dirt, looking for meanings, they wanted to do it themselves: they wanted to load their dirt with their own meanings.

He sat up with a start and said, in Arabic: "That's what you are Ava, a Dust-Counter, "Addaad al-Turaab."

He said it under his breath, but Ava heard him anyway. He could have sworn that she was actually startled: her "eye," a laser-guided surveillance camera, swiveled on him while the screen misted over with standby graphics. Then Ava began to spit out translations of the Arabic phrase, going through the world's languages in declining order of population: Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali . . . It was funny at first, but when it got to the dialects of the Upper Amazon Antar couldn't bear it any longer. "Stop showing off," he shouted. "You don't have to show me you know everything there is to know. Iskuti; shut up."

But it was Ava who silenced him instead, serenely spitting the phrases back at him. Antar listened awestruck as "shut up" took on the foliage of the Upper Amazon.

* * *

two

Antar was waiting to sign off when the card and chain showed up on Ava's screen. His eyes kept straying to the timeline; he'd been hoping to get off a few minutes early. His neighbor, a young woman who had moved in next door a few months earlier, had invited herself over that evening. She was going to bring dinner. Antar wanted some time to himself before she came: he'd been planning to get a shower and go for his usual evening walk to Penn Station. There was still half an hour to go before he got off, at six.

Restive as he was, Antar probably wouldn't have given the card a second glance; left to himself, he'd have dispatched it with a keystroke, sent it tumbling into the unbounded darkness of Ava's heart. It was only because Ava went into one of her trances of unrecognition over the metal chain that he took a closer look.

The chain was made up of very small interlocking metal spheres. It was scuffed and rusted with all the nickel-plating gone, but Antar knew what it was the moment he saw it. He'd worn one himself, for years, while he was working at LifeWatch.

LifeWatch was a small but respected non-profit organization that served as a global public health consultancy and epidemiological data bank. Antar had worked there much of his life, as a programmer and systems analyst. In a sense he worked there still except that LifeWatch had long since been absorbed, along with many other such independent agencies, into the mammoth public health wing of the newly formed International Water Council. Like most of his colleagues, Antar had been assigned to an inconsequential "At Home" job to see him through to retirement. He was still technically on the Council's payrolls, but he had never set foot in its New York offices. He had not had reason to: they communicated with him through Ava whenever they wanted, which wasn't often.

Antar could remember a time when those little chains had been standard issue at LifeWatch, along with bar-coded identity cards. Some people preferred to wear their cards on clips; he'd always liked the chains himself. He liked the feel of the metal balls, running through his fingernails; they were like miniature worry-beads.

He lingered over the chain for a moment. They hadn't been around for years now and he couldn't quite recall when they were first introduced: probably sometime in the 1980s. He had been at LifeWatch for well over ten years by that time. He had joined immediately after graduating from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow: this was in the days when the Russians were still handing out scholarships to students from poor countries; when Moscow was the best place in the world to study linear programming. LifeWatch had advertised internationally for a programmer and analyst, to bring their accounts online. It was a number-crunching job, not what he had been trained for. But, on the other hand, it was safe, secure, settled, and it offered an American salary and a guaranteed visa. He'd responded immediately, without really expecting to get the job: he knew the competition would be fierce. As it turned out, he was third on the shortlist but the two people who were ahead of him got other offers.

Antar rubbed his fingertips, overcome by a tactile nostalgia, recalling the feel of those chains and those laminated plastic ID cards. The chains came in two sizes, he remembered: you could wear them around your neck or thread them through a buttonhole. He'd always preferred the shorter chains.

He took his time, keying in answers to Ava's questions. In the meanwhile Ava was toying with the card, flipping it over, blowing up segments in random order.

Suddenly a symbol flashed across the monitor, shooting off at an angle, rotating and diminishing as it went. It caught Antar's eye just before it spun off the edge of the screen. He lunged at the keyboard, and tracked slowly back. When he had the symbol centered he froze the frame.

It was years since he'd seen the once-familiar logo of LifeWatch, a neatly stylized image of two intertwined laurel wreaths. And here it was now, in front of him, plucked out of the bottom of a lost ID card. Antar turned the card over, on Ava's screen, intrigued at the sight of the symbol, so well known and so long forgotten. He brought the card back on screen, life size, and blew it up, slowly. There couldn't be any doubt about it: it was a LifeWatch ID.

He guessed the card was from the mid-eighties or early nineties or thereabouts--a time when he had spent so many hours with spreadsheets that he'd got to know every name that ever appeared on LifeWatch's payroll. Looking at that grubby old card suspended in front of him he began to wonder whom it had belonged to. He was sure he'd know the name--that at the very least. He might even recognize the face in the picture.

Without thinking, he tapped in a sequence of commands. Ava's screen went momentarily blank as she began reconstructing the card, restoring the original. Almost immediately Antar regretted the command. The process could take a while, and sign-off time was just twenty-five minutes away now. He gave his chair a kick, annoyed with himself. As the chair spun around, he noticed that a word had appeared on the screen, under a line that said "Point of Origin." Jamming his foot on the floor, he brought the chair to a halt.

He didn't usually bother to check where the inventories originated: they came through in such quantities it didn't seem to matter much. But he was curious now, especially when "Lhasa" appeared on his screen. He tried to think back to the eighties and nineties and whether LifeWatch had had an office there at the time. Then he noticed that the word "Lhasa" was prefixed by a symbol which indicated that the item had merely joined the information flow there. It had been found somewhere else.

He looked over his shoulder and discovered that the pale outline of an enormous white triangle had begun to materialize in his living room, a few feet away. Ava had started to create a holographic projection of the reconstructed card: the cloudy triangle represented the top left-hand corner, hugely magnified. He began to drum his fingers on the arms of his chair, wondering whether he had the energy or the inclination to ask Ava where the card had been found. It was always hard to tell when something came through Lhasa.

Lhasa was the International Water Council's continental command center for Asia. The Council's officers called it the de facto capital of Asia because it had the unique distinction of being the only command center in the world that was in charge of not one but several major Hydraulic Regions: the Ganges-Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the trans-Yangtze, the Hwang-Ho. The Council's information streams for the eastern half of the continent were all routed through Lhasa. This meant that the card could have entered the system anywhere between Karachi and Vladivostok.

He looked over his shoulder again. Ava was taking longer than he'd thought: she was just getting started on the photograph, at the top right-hand corner of the card. He glanced at the timeline. He really didn't have much time if he was going to walk down to Penn Station before his neighbor, Tara, came over.

Idly, waiting for Ava to put the photograph together, he typed in another command, asking for a follow-up narrative on the card's chain of provenances. Ava took an instant longer than usual, but it was still no more than a couple of seconds before she produced the name of the city where the card had been found.

It was Calcutta.