Magid, Millat and Marcus 1992,1999

fundamental/a. & n. 1MB. adj. i Of or pertaining to the basis or groundwork; going to the root

of the matter. 2 Serving as the base or foundation; essential or indispensable. Also, primary, original;

from which others are derived. 3 Of or pertaining to the foundations) of a building. 4 Of a stratum:

lowest, lying at the bottom.

Fundamentalism n. E2,o [f. prec. +ism.] The strictmaintenance of traditionalorthodox religious

beliefs or doctrines; esp. belief in the in errancy of religious texts.



The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss,

A sigh is just a sigh;

The fundamental things apply,

As time goes by.

Herman Hupfeld, "As Time Goes By' (1931 song)

16 The Return ofMagid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal

"Excuse me, you're not going to smoke that, are you?"

Marcus closed his eyes. He hated the construction. He always wanted to reply with equal

grammatical perversity: Yes, I'm not going to smoke that. No, I am going to smoke that.

"Excuse me, I said you're '

"Yes, I heard you the first time," said Marcus softly, turning to his right to see the speaker with

whom he shared a single armrest, each two chairs being assigned only one between them in the

long line of moulded plastic. "Is there a reason why I shouldn't?"

Irritation vanished at the sight of his interlocutor: a slim, pretty Asian girl, with an alluring gap

between her front teeth, army trousers and a high ponytail, who was holding in her lap (of all

things!) a copy of his collaborative pop science book of last spring (with the novelist Surrey The.

Banks), Time Bombs and Body Clocks: Adventures in Our Genetic Future.

"Yes, there's a reason, arsehok. You can't smoke in Heathrow. Not in this bit of it. And you

certainly can't smoke a fucking pipe. And these chairs are welded to each other and I've got asthma.

Enough reasons?"

Marcus shrugged amiably. "Yes, more than. Good book?"

This was a new experience for Marcus. Meeting one of his readers. Meeting one of his readers

in the waiting lounge of an airport. He had been a writer of academic texts all his life, texts whose

audience was tiny and select, whose members he more often than not knew personally. He had

never sent his work off into the world like a party-popper, unsure where the different strands would

land.

"Pardon?"

"Don't worry, I won't smoke if you don't want me to. I was just wondering, is it a good book?"

The girl screwed up her face, which was not as pretty as Marcus had first thought, the jawline a

tad too severe. She closed the book (she was halfway through) and looked at its cover as if she had

forgotten which book it was.

"Oh, it's all right, I suppose. Bit bloody weird. Bit of a head fuck

Marcus frowned. The book had been his agent's idea: a split level high low culture book,

whereby Marcus wrote a 'hard science' chapter on one particular development in genetics and then

the novelist wrote a twin chapter exploring these ideas from a futuristic, fictional,

what-if-this-led-to-this point of view, and so on for eight chapters each. Marcus had

university-bound sons plus Magid's law schooling to think about, and he had agreed to the project

for pecuniary reasons. To that end, the book had not been the hit that was hoped for or required, and

Marcus, when he thought of it at all, thought it was a failure. But weird? A head fuck

"Umm, in what way weird?"

The girl looked suddenly suspicious. "What is this? An interrogation?"

Marcus shrink的过去式">shrank back a little. His Chalfenist confidence was always less evident when he strayed

abroad, away from the bosom of his family. He was a direct man who saw no point in asking

anything other than the direct questions, but in recent years he had become aware that this

directness did not always garner direct answers from strangers, as it did in his own small circle. In

the outside world, outside of his college and home, one had to add things to speech. Particularly if

one was somewhat strange-looking, as Marcus gathered he was; if one was a little old, with

eccentric curly hair and spectacles missing their lower rims. You had to add things to your speech

to make it more palatable. Niceties, throwaway phrases, pleases and thank yous.

"No, not an interrogation. I was just thinking of reading it

myself, you see. I heard it was quite good, you know. And I was wondering why you thought it

was weird."

The girl, deciding at that moment that Marcus was neither mass murderer nor rapist, let her

muscles relax and slid back in her chair. "Oh, I don't know. Not so much weird, I guess, more

scary."

"Scary how?"

"Well, it's scary isn't it, all this genetic engineering."

"Is it?"

"Yeah, you know, messing about with the body. They reckon there's a gene for intelligence,

sexuality practically everything, you know? Recombinant DNA technology," said the girl, using the

term cautiously, as if testing the water to see how much Marcus knew. Seeing no recognition in his

face, she continued with more confidence. "Once you know the restriction enzyme for a particular,

like, bit of DNA, you can switch anything on or off, like a bloody stereo. That's what they're doing

to those poor mice. It's pretty fucking scary. Not to mention, like, the pathogenic, i.e."

disease-producing, organisms they've got sitting in petri dishes all over the place. I mean, I'm a

politics student, yeah, and I'm like: what are they creating? And who do they want to wipe out?

You've got to be seriously naive if you don't think the West intend to use this shit in the East, on the

Arabs. Quick way to deal with the fundamentalist Muslims no, seriously, man," said the girl in

response to a raised eyebrow from Marcus, 'things are getting scary. I mean, reading this shit you

just realize how close science is to science fiction."

As far as Marcus could see, science and science fiction were like ships in the night, passing

each other in the fog. A science fiction robot, for example even his son Oscar's expectation of a

robot was a thousand years ahead of anything either robotics or artificial intelligence could yet

achieve. While the robots in Oscar's mind were singing, dancing and empathizing with his every

joy and fear, over at MIT some poor bastard was slowly

and painstakingly trying to get a machine to re-create the movements of a single human thumb.

On the flip side of the coin, the simplest biological facts, the structure of animal cells for instance,

were a mystery to all but fourteen-year-old children and scientists like himself; the former spending

their time drawing them in class, the latter injecting them with foreign DNA. In between, or so it

appeared to Marcus, flowed a great ocean of idiots, conspiracists, religious lunatics, presumptuous

novelists, animal rights activists, students of politics, and all the other breeds of fundamentalists

who professed strange objections to his life's work. In the past few months, since his Future Mouse

had gained some public attention, he had been forced to believe in these people, believe they

actually existed en masse, and this was as hard for him as being taken to the bottom of the garden

and told that here lived fairies.

"I mean, they talk about progress," said the girl shrilly, becoming somewhat excited. "They talk

about leaps and bounds in the field of medicine yada yada yada, but bottom line, if somebody

knows how to eliminate "undesirable" qualities in people, do you think some government's not

going to do it? I mean, what's undesirable? There's just something a little fascist about the whole

deal... I guess it's a good book, but at points you do think: where are we going here? Millions of

blonds with blue eyes? Mail order babies? I mean, if you're Indian like me you've got something to

worry about, yeah? And then they're planting cancers in poor creatures; like, who are you to mess

with the make-up of a mouse? Actually creating an animal just so it can die it's like being God! I

mean personally I'm a Hindu, yeah? I'm not religious or nothing, but you know, I believe in the

sanctity of life, yeah? And these people, like, program the mouse, plot its every move, yeah, when

it's going to have kids, when it's going to die. It's just unnatural."

Marcus nodded and tried to disguise his exhaustion. It was exhausting just to listen to her.

Nowhere in the book did Marcus



16 The Return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal -1

even touch upon human eugenics it wasn't his field, and he had no particular interest in it. And

yet this girl had managed to read a book almost entirely concerned with the more prosaic

developments in recombinant DNA gene therapy, proteins to dissolve blood clots, the cloning of

insulin and emerge from it full of the usual neo-fascist tabloid fantasies mindless human clones,

genetic policing of sexual and racial characteristics, mutated diseases, etc. Only the chapter on his

mouse could have prompted such an hysterical reaction. It was to his mouse that the title of the

book referred (again, the agent's idea), and it was his mouse upon which media attention had landed.

Marcus saw clearly now what he had previously only suspected, that if it were not for the mouse

there would have been little interest in the book at all. No other work he had been involved with

seemed to catch the public imagination like his mice. To determine a mouse's future stirred people

up. Precisely because people saw it that way: it wasn't determining the future of a cancer, or a

reproductive cycle, or the capacity to age. It was determining the future of the mouse. People

focused on the mouse in a manner that never failed to surprise him. They seemed unable to think of

the animal as a site, a biological site for experimentation into heredity, into disease, into mortality.

The mouse ness of the mouse seemed inescapable. A picture from Marcus's laboratory of one of his

trans genic mice, along with an article about the struggle for a patent, had appeared in The Times.

Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative

Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St. Agnes's

Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews. Neena Begum phoned to inform

him that he would be reincarnated as a cockroach. Glenard Oak, always acute to a turning media

tide, retracted their invitation for Marcus to come to school during National Science week. His own

son, his Joshua, still refused to speak to him. The insanity of all of it genuinely shook him. The fear

he

had unwittingly provoked. And all because the public were three |B steps ahead of him like

Oscar's robot, they had already played ,^ out their end games already concluded what the result of

his 12 research would be something he did not presume to imagine! ;lB full of their clones, zombies,

designer children, gay genes. Of *i| course, he understood the work he did involved some element

of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future

ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your

door. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through

his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisen

berg's hands? What can you hope to achieve?

"But surely," Marcus began, more rattled than he expected himself to be, 'surely that's rather the

point. All animals are in a sense programmed to die. It's perfectly natural. If it appears random,

that's only because we don't clearly understand it, you see. We don't properly understand why some

people seem predisposed to cancer. We don't properly understand why some people die of natural

causes at sixty-three and some at ninety seven. Surely it would be interesting to know a little more

about these things. Surely the point of something like an oncomouse is that we're given the

opportunity to see a life and a death stage by stage under the micro '

"Yeah, well," said the girl, putting the book in her bag. "Whatever. I've got to get to gate 52. It

was nice talking to you. But yeah, you should definitely give it a read. I'm a big fan of Surrey The .

Banks ... he writes some freaky shit."

Marcus watched the girl and her bouncing ponytail progress down the wide walkway until she

merged with other dark-haired girls and was lost. Instantly, he felt relieved and remembered with

pleasure his own appointment with gate 32 and Magid Iqbal, who was a different kettle offish, or a

blacker kettle, or whatever the phrase was. With fifteen minutes to spare, he abandoned his

coffee which had gone rapidly from scalding to lukewarm, and began to walk in the direction of

the lower 505. The phrase 'a meeting of minds' was running through his head. He knew this was an

absurd thing to think of a seventeen-year-old boy, but still he thought it, felt it: a certain elation,

maybe equal to the feeling his own mentor experienced when the seventeen-year-old Marcus

Chalfen first walked into his poky college office. A certain satisfaction. Marcus was familiar with

the mutually beneficial smugness that runs from mentor to protege and back again (ah, but you are

brilliant and deign to spend your time with me! Ah, but I am brilliant and catch your attention

above all others!). Still, he indulged himself. And he was glad to be meeting Magid for the first

time, alone, though he hoped he was not guilty of planning it that way. It was more a series of

fortunate accidents. The Iqbals' car had broken down, and Marcus's hatchback was not large. He

had persuaded Samad and Alsana that there would not be enough room for Magid's luggage if they

came with him. Millat was in Chester with KEVIN and had been quoted as saying (in language

reminiscent of his Mafia video days), "I have no brother." Me had an exam in the morning. Joshua

refused to get in any car if Marcus was in it; in fact, he generally eschewed cars at present, opting

for the environmentally ethical option of two wheels. As far as Josh's decision went, Marcus felt as

he did about all human decisions of this kind. One could neither agree nor disagree with them as

ideas. There was no rhyme nor reason for so much of what people did. And in his present

estrangement from Joshua he felt more powerless than ever. It hurt him that even his own son was

not as Chalfenist as he'd hoped. And over the past few months he had built up great expectations

ofMagid (and this would explain why his pace quickened, gate 28, gate 29, gate 30); maybe he had

begun to hope, begun to believe, that Magid would be a beacon for right-thinking Chalfenism even

as it died a death here in the wilderness. They would save each other. This couldn't be faith could it,

Marcus? He questioned himself

directly on this point as he scurried along. For a gate and a half the question unnerved him.

Then it passed and the answer was reassuring. Not faith, no, Marcus, not the kind with no eyes.

Something stronger, something firmer. Intellectual faith.

So. Gate 32. It would be just the two of them, then, meeting at last, having conquered the gap

between continents; the teacher, the willing pupil, and then that first, historichandshake. Marcus

did not think for a second it could or would go badly. He was no student of history (and science had

taught him that the past was where we did things through a glass, darkly, whereas the future was

always brighter, a place where we did things right or at least righter he had no stories to scare him

concerning a dark man meeting a white man, both with heavy expectations, but only one with the

power. He had brought no piece of white cardboard either, some large banner with a name upon it,

like the rest of his fellow waiters, and as he looked around gate 32, that concerned him. How would

they know each other? Then he remembered he was meeting a twin, and remembering that made

him laugh out loud. It was incredible and sublime, even to him, that a boy should walk out of that

tunnel with precisely the same genetic code as a boy he already knew, and yet in every conceivable

way be different. He would see him and yet not see him. He would recognize him and yet that

recognition would be false. Before he had a chance to think what this meant, whether it meant

anything, they were coming towards him, the passengers of BA flight 261; a talkative but exhausted

brown mob who rushed towards him like a river, turning off at the last minute as if he were the

edge of a waterfall. Nomoskdr .. . saldm a lekum .. . kamon dcho? This is what they said to each

other and their friends on the other side of the barrier; some women in full purdah, some in saris,

men in strange mixtures of fabrics, leather, tweed, wool and nylon, with little boat-hats that

reminded Marcus of Nehru; children in jumpers made by the Taiwanese and rucksacks of bright

reds and yellows; pushing through the doors to the

concourse of gate 32; meeting aunts, meeting drivers, meeting children, meeting officials,

meeting sun-tanned white-toothed airline representatives .. .

"You are Mr. Chalfen."

Meeting minds. Marcus lifted his head to look at the tall young man standing in front of him. It

was Millat's face, certainly, but it was cleaner cut, and somewhat younger in appearance. The eyes

were not so violet, or at least not so violently violet. The hair was floppy in the English public

school style and brushed forward. The form was ever so thickly set and healthy. Marcus was no

good on clothes, but he could say at least that they were entirely white and that the overall

impression was of good materials, well made and soft. And he was handsome, even Marcus could

see that. What he lacked in the Byronic charisma of his brother, he seemed to gain in nobility, with

a sturdier chin and a dignified jaw. These were all pins in haystacks, however, these were the

differences you notice only because the similarity is so striking. They were twins from their broken

noses to their huge, ungainly feet. Marcus was conscious of a very faint feeling of disappointment

that this was so. But superficial exteriors aside, there was no doubting, Marcus thought, who this

boy Magid truly resembled. Hadn't Magid spotted Marcus from a crowd of many? Hadn't they

recognized each other, just now, at a far deeper, fundamental level? Not twinned like cities or the

two halves of a randomly split ovum, but twinned like each side of an equation: logically,

essentially, inevitably. As rationalists are wont, Marcus abandoned rationalism for a moment in the

face of the sheer wonder of the thing. This instinctive meeting at gate 32 (Magid had strode across

the floor and walked directly to him), finding each other like this in a great swell of people, five

hundred at least: what were the chances? It seemed as unlikely as the feat of the sperm who

conquer the blind passage towards the egg. As magical as that egg splitting in two. Magid and

Marcus. Marcus and Magid.

"Yes! Magid! We finally meet! I feel as if I know you already well, I do, but then again I don't