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Nine
Another one that was wrong! Je
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, Je
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 co
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 Je
“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 Je
“Can I see what you’re doing?”
“Sure,” said Je
“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 Je
“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 Je
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. Je
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 Je