Nine

Another one that was wrong! Jenny rubbed her eyes and peered again through the objectives of the binocular microscope. She used the needle to nudge the tiny specimen so that the light struck it at a slightly different angle. She would have said it was aPegoscapus gemellus, except that the pattern of its radial and costal wing veins was more like that ofP. insularis. Only it couldn’t beinsularis because it lacked the characteristic leg segment proportions and recurved ovipositor that marked that species. The ovipositor was long but almost straight; there was nothing like this combination of features on the key chart. Sighing, she removed the oddball fig wasp from the microscope stage and put her in a vial with half a dozen others that were similarly screwed up. The next one was a goodgemellus, and she dropped it into a labeled vial and made a notation of its specimen number in the notebook.

She was not pleased when a wrong one turned up, for in the week or so that she had been keying out for the professor she had come to expect that the little wasps would behave themselves and fall properly into either one of the two species they were studying. Finding ringers offended her sense of order, which was as strong as it was recent, perhaps strongbecause recent. Prior to this, Jennifer had not devoted three brain cells to any contemplation of nature’s diversity more complex than the one expounded in “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

Along with her knowledge about the taxonomy of the fig wasps, she had absorbed the faith thatevery living thing had to fit neatly into the immense ragged bush-structure of life-phylum, class, order, superfamily, family, genus, species-all connected by evolution. It boggled her mind; in fact, it was her very first boggle. So every living thing had to go somewhere, and the odd little wasps displeased her for that reason. She understood that her preliminary sorting would be confirmed by mitochondrial sequencing in the lab later on (not that she had any clear idea what that was), but she wanted to get it right, to please Cooksey. That was something new as well. Although she had always tried to please-given her background, she would hardly have survived otherwise-pleasing Cooksey was different. Cooksey did not seem to be pleased because what she did was good for Cooksey as much as because doing something well was good for her and also good for…here she was uncertain, because she lacked the concepts, but she sensed that for Cooksey doing things right was a form of worship. God is in the details, my dear, something he said often. It was her very first contact with true parenting, and it went to her head like crank.

On the other hand, she had begun to comprehend the difference between what she was doing and what real biologists did, going into the field and being surrounded by millions of species and figuring out what went where and the pattern of relationship, how the substance of life poured through the depths of time in an unending and ever-varying stream. That kind of understanding would be forever beyond her, she knew, but the mere idea that there were such people (and Cooksey was one of them) made her feel better about herself than she ever had before. It was like being the worst player on a world championship team: still pretty great.

And she had discovered she could lose herself in the microscope as well as she had in the fishpond. As now: therefore, she did not hear Geli Vargos come in, did not register her greeting, did not respond until a hand touched her shoulder, when she yelped and jumped and nearly toppled the stool.

“Wow, you must have been deep in it,” said Geli.

“Yeah, I was. Anyway, where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you for I don’t know how long.”

“Oh, you know, family stuff. My cousin’s getting married. My grandfather’s going crazy. The usualCubano twenty-four-seven nonsense.” This was said in a tone that did not suggest a willingness to go into detail, which Jenny thought a little funny, because Geli was usually delighted to expatiate on the doings of her family, and she had in Jenny, whose own life was void in this area, a devout listener. Geli pointed to the microscope setup. “What’re you doing with the mike?”

“I’m keying out species of Agaonidae for Cooksey.”

“You’rewhat?”

“What I said. It’s for his work on the evolution of mutualism and precision of adaptation. He showed me how to do it.”

“Uh-huh. Well, this is a step up from making breakfast. How did all this happen?”

“I don’t know. They were going to kick me out on account of I lost Moie, and Cooksey said I could work for him and I’m doing it. I’m a research assistant, how about that? And I still make breakfast.”

“I’m impressed,” said Geli, although Jennifer detected something in her tone that was not pleased, was a little put off, in fact, and she wondered why.

“Can I see what you’re doing?”

“Sure,” said Jenny, and set her friend up at the other eyepiece while she tweezed a tiny wasp onto the stage and keyed it, and then another, bothP. insularis, explaining the differences, proudly using the technical terms, like a real person.

“So does Cooksey check on your work?” Geli asked after this demonstration.

“He did when I was starting up, but not anymore. He says I can do it as good as him, almost.”

“Well, good.” A pause, and then, “I guess this means you won’t be going out on runs with me anymore.”

“I don’t know. You’d have to speak to Luna about that. Kevin and Scotty’ve been doing it while you were gone and since I started all this.”

“Oh, that’s an effective team! Scotty mumbling and Kevin fomenting the revolution. What does Kevin think about all this?” She gestured to the microscope and specimen boxes.

“I don’t know. I moved out on him after he gave me grief about it. We haven’t talked much, since then. He, like,mopes at me.” She fiddled with the focus knob and swiveled on her stool. “I still sort of love him, though. We were together like a long time, almost two years. And I get lonely at night, you know?”

Geli actually did not know, but she was not about to reveal this to Jennifer. Nor did she comment on the semibreak with Kevin, which Jenny thought was also a little strange, since she used to go on so about it.

“I’ve got to go talk to Luna,” Geli said. “Will I see you at lunch?”

“If you don’t, there won’t be any,” replied Jenny cheerfully, and returned to her specimens.

She worked steadily for the next two hours and was surprised and delighted to discover that she had come to the end of the series, which was a sample of one hatch from trees of two different species ofFicus. She put the last vials back in their specimen boxes, and these back on their shelves, all except the vial of wasps she couldn’t identify from the key. Then she stretched her stiff back muscles and went into the kitchen to help Scotty make tuna salad for lunch. Tuna salad at La Casita was made with fresh tuna. Jenny had not realized before coming to the Forest Planet Alliance that tuna was an actual fish that you could buy in fish stores and cook. She thought it was a made-up substance that, like Spam, only came in cans. Nor had she understood that mayonnaise could be manufactured in a kitchen out of eggs and oil, instead of being something that was elemental, like gasoline, that you had to buy retail. She made the mayonnaise as she had been taught, and hardboiled half a dozen eggs while Scotty washed the greens and peeled avocados and then seared the tuna. They worked together almost silently but well, not getting in each other’s way. It used to bother her that Scotty never talked to her, but now that she had a little something in her own head, she didn’t mind it that much, she was less bothered by the absence of chatter. Also, she had Cooksey.

Talking with Cooksey was different from talking to the rest of them, different indeed from talking to anyone else she had ever met. Geli, for instance, was always willing to tell you stuff, about science and politics, but it was like she was the teacher and you were the pupil and you had to sort of be admiring and oh, wow, I didn’t know that, how smart you are! But it never occurred to Cooksey that everyone didn’t know everything he did and so he just zoomed on, assuming she would understand, like she’d been to college in England, too, and when he would pause and say “Eh?” to see if she had understood, she would say right out she hadn’t. At which a peculiar expression would come over his face, as if she reallydid understand, say, sex allocation theory or whatever and was pretending not to as a joke, and then he would demonstrate, by means of skillful questions, that she reallydid understand the stuff. There is no idea in all science that can’t be grasped by the persistent application of the second-rate mind, said Cooksey, quoting Whitehead. He quoted Whitehead a lot, also Yeats, and a bunch of other people Jenny had never heard of. Not, he said on that occasion, thatyou have a second-rate mind, my dear, for since it is almost perfectly empty, we have not had a chance to rate it at all. And you are in any case persistent, as I have often observed.