74

Seattle

JUNE

Kaye arranged her papers on Mitch’s desk and picked up the manuscript for The Queen’s Library. Three weeks ago, she had decided to write a book about SHEVA, modern biology, all she felt the human race might need to know in the coming years. The title referred to her metaphor for the genome, with all of its ferment and movable elements and self-interested players, rendering service to the genome queen with one side of their nature, selfishly hoping to be installed in the Queen’s Library, the DNA; and sometimes putting on another face, another role, more selfish than useful, parasitic or predatory, causing trouble or even disaster...A political metaphor that seemed perfectly apt now.

In the past two weeks, she had written over a hundred and sixty pages on her laptop computer, printing them out on a portable printer, partly as a way of getting her thoughts together before the convention.

And to pass the time. The hours sometimes drag when Mitch is away.

She knocked the papers together on the wood, satisfied by the solid thunk they made, then placed them before the picture of Christopher Dicken that stood in a small silver frame near a portrait of Sam and Abby. The last picture in her box of personal items was a black-and-white glossy of Saul, taken by a professional photographer on Long Island. Saul appeared able, grinning, confident, wise. They had sent copies of that picture with the business prospectus for EcoBacter to venture capital firms over five years ago. An age.

Kaye had spent very little time looking back on her past, or gathering memorabilia. Now she regretted that. She wanted their baby to have a sense of what had happened. When she looked at herself in the mirror, she appeared almost peachlike in her health and vitality. Pregnancy was treating her very well.

As if she could not get enough of writing, recording, she had begun a diary three days ago, the first diary she had ever kept.

June 10

We spent last week preparing for the conference and looking for a house. Interest rates have gone through the roof, now at twenty-one percent, but we can afford something larger than the apartment, and Mitch isn ‘t particular. I am. Mitch is writing more slowly than I am, about the mummies and the cave, sending it page by page to Oliver Merton in New York, who is editing it, sometimes a little cruelly. Mitch takes it quietly, tries to improve. We have become so literary, so self-observant, maybe a little self-important, since there is not much else to keep us occupied.

Mitch is gone this afternoon talking to the new director of the Hayer, hoping to get reinstated. (He never travels more than twenty minutes from the apartment, and we bought another cell phone the day before yesterday. I tell him I can take care of myself, but he worries.)

He has a letter from Professor Brock describing the nature of the current controversy. Brock has been on a few talk shows. Some newspapers have carried the story, and Merton s piece in NATURE is drawing a lot of attention and a lot of criticism.

Innsbruck still holds all the tissue samples and will not comment or release, but Mitch is working on his friends at UWto get them to go public with what they know, to undermine Innsbruck’s secrecy. Merton believes the gradualists in charge of the mummies have at most another two or three months to prepare their reports and make them public, or they ‘II be removed, replaced, Brock hopes, by a a more objective team, and clearly he hopes to be in charge. Mitch might be on that team, too; though that seems too much to hope for.

Merton and Daney were unable to convince the New York Emergency Action Office to hold the conference in Albany. Something about 1845 and Governor Silas Wright and rent riots; they don’t want a repeat under this “experimental “ and “temporary “ Emergency Act.

We petitioned the Washington Emergency Action Office through Maria Konig at UW, and they allowed a two-day conference at Kane Hall, one hundred attendees maximum, all to be approved by the office. Civil liberties haven’t been completely forgotten, but almost. Nobody wants to call it martial law, and in fact the civil courts are still in full operation, but they work with approval of the Office in each state.

Nothing like it since 1942, Mitch says.

I feel spooky: healthy, vital, energetic, and I don’t look very pregnant. The hormones are the same, the effect the same.

I go in for my sonogram and scan tomorrow at Marine Pacific, and we ‘II do amnio and chorionic villi despite the risks because we want to know the character of the tissues.

The next step won’t be so easy.

Mrs. Hamilton, now I’m a lab rat, too.