by Nancy Kress
“What does he do?”
Jean-Paul twisted his body toward me in the seat of the car. “He is a soccer player! One of the best in the world! If you followed the sport, you would know his name. Claude Despreaux. Soccer—now there is illusion worth creating!”
His tone was exactly Anton Privitera’s, talking about ballet.
Thursday evening, just before the presentation, I finally caught Deborah at home. Her face on the phonevid was drawn and strained. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Mom. How’s Paris?”
“Wet. Deborah, you’re not telling me the truth.”
“Everything’s fine! I just . . . just had a complicated rehearsal today.”
The corps de ballet does not usually demand complicated rehearsals. The function of the corps is to move gracefully behind the soloists and principal dancers; it’s seldom allowed to do anything that will distract from their virtuosity. I said carefully, “Are you injured?”
“No, of course not. Look, I have to go.”
“Deborah . . .”
“They’re waiting for me!” The screen went blank.
Who was waiting for her? It was 1:00 A.M. in New York.
When I called back, there was no answer.
I went to the Grand Ballroom. Jean-Paul had been holding both our seats, lousy ones, since noon. An hour later, the presentation still had not started.
The audience fidgeted, tense and muttering. Finally a woman dressed in a severe suit entered. She spoke German. Jean-Paul translated into my ear.
“Good evening. I am Katya Waggenschauser. I have an announcement before we begin. I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. Dr. Taillebois . . . he . . .” Abruptly she ran off the stage.
The muttering rose to an astonished roar.
A man walked on stage. The crowd quieted immediately. Jean-Paul translated from the French, “I am Dr. Valois of the Pasteur Institute. Shortly Dr. Erbland will begin the presentation. But I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. There has been an unfortunate accident. Dr. Taillebois is dead.”
The murmuring rose, fell again. I heard reporters whispering into camphones in six languages.
“In a few moments Dr. Erbland will make her and Dr. Taillebois’s presentation. Please be patient just a few moments longer.”
Eventually someone introduced Dr. Erbland, a long and fulsome introduction, and she walked onto the stage. A thin, tall woman in her sixties, she looked shaken and pale. She opened by speaking about how various kinds of bioenhancement differed from each other in intent, procedure, and biological mechanism. Most bioenhancements were introduced into an adult body that had already finished growing. A few, usually aimed at correcting hereditary problems, were carried out on infants. Those procedures were somewhat closer to the kinds of genetic re-engineering—it was not referred to merely as “bioenhancement”—that produced new strains of animals. And as with animals, science had long known that it was possible to manipulate pre-embryonic human genes in the same way, in vitro.
The audience grew completely quiet.
In vitro work, Dr. Erbland said, offered by its nature fewer guides and guarantees. There were much coded redundancies in genetic information, and that made it difficult to determine long-term happenings. The human genome map, the basis of all embryonic reengineering, had been complete for forty years, but “complete” was not the same as “understood.” The body had many genetic behaviors that researchers were only just beginning to understand. No one could have expected that when embryonic re-engineering first began, as a highly experimental undertaking, that genetic identity would be so stubborn.
Stubborn? I didn’t know what she meant. Apparently, neither did anybody else in the audience. People scarcely breathed.
This experimental nature of embryonic manipulation in humans did not, of course, stop experimentation, Dr. Erbland continued. Before such experimentation was declared illegal by the Copenhagen Accord, many laboratories around the world had advanced science with the cooperation of voluntary subjects. Completely voluntary, she said. She said it three times.
I wondered how an embryo volunteered.
These voluntary subjects had been re-engineered using variants of the same techniques that produced in vitro bioenhancements in other mammals. Her company, in conjunction with the Pasteur Research Institute, had been pioneers in the new techniques. For over thirty years.
Thirty years. My search of the literature had found nothing going back that far. At least not those available on the standard scientific nets. If such “re-engineered” embryos had been allowed to fully gestate, and had survived, they were just barely within the cut-off date for legal existence. Were we talking about embryos or people here?
Dr. Erbland made a curious gesture: raising both arms from the elbow, then letting them fall. It looked almost like a plea. Was she making a public confession of breaking international law? Why would she do that?
Over such a long time, Dr. Erbland continued, the human genetic identity, encoded in “jumping genes” in many unsuspected redundant ways, reasserted itself. This was the subject of her and Dr. Taillebois’s work. Unfortunately, the effect on the organism—completely unanticipated by anyone—could be biologically devestating. This first graphic showed basal DNA changes in a re-engineered embryo created twenty-five years ago. The subject, a male, was—
A holograph projected a complicated, three-dimensional genemap.
The scientists in the audience leaned forward intently. The nonscientists looked at each other.
As the presentation progressed, anchored in graphs and formulas and genemap holos, it became clear even to me what Dr. Erbland was actually saying.
European geneticists had been experimenting on embryos as long as thirty years ago, and never stopped. They had allowed some of those embryos to become people. Against international law, and without knowing the long-term effects. And now the long-term effects, like old bills, were coming due, and those people’s bodies were destroying themselves at the genetic level.
We had engineered a bioenhanced cancer to replace the natural one we had conquered.
It was a few moments before I noticed that Jean-Paul had stopped translating. He sat like stone, his wrinkled face lengthened in sorrow.
The audience forgot this was a scientific conference. “How many people have been re-engineered at an embryonic level?” someone shouted in English. “Total number worldwide!”
Someone else shouted, “A todos van a morir?”
“Les lois internationales—”
“Der sagt—”
Dr. Erbland broke into a long, passionate speech, clearly not part of the prepared presentation. I caught the word “sagt” several times: law. I remembered that Dr. Erbland worked for a commercial biotech firm wholly owned by a pharmaceutical company.
The same company in which Anna Olson owned a fortune in stock. Jean-Paul said quietly, “My grandson. Claude. He was one of those embryos. They told us it was safe. . . .”
I looked at the old man, slumped forward, and I couldn’t find any sympathy for him. That appalled me. A cherished grandson . . . But they had agreed, Claude’s parents, to roulette with a child’s life. In order to produce a superior soccer player. “Soccer—now there is an illusion worth creating.”
I remembered Anna Olson at the demonstration by the Lincoln Center fountain: “Caroline had a good run. For a dancer.” Caroline Olson, Deborah said, had been fired because she missed rehearsals and performances. The Times had called her last performance “a travesty.” Because her body was eating itself at a genetic level, undetectable by the City Ballet bioscans that assumed you could compare new DNA patterns to the body’s original, which no procedure completely erased. But for Caroline, the original itself had carried the hidden blueprint for destruction. For twenty-six years.
The ultimate ballet mother had made Caroline into what Anna Olson needed her to be. For as long as Caroline might last.
And then I r
emembered little Marguerite, standing with her perfect turn out in fifth position.
I stood and pushed my way to the exit. I had to get out of that room. Nobody else left. Dr. Erbland, rattled and afraid, tried to answer questions shouted in six languages. I shoved past a woman who was punching her neighbor. Gendarmes appeared as if conjured from the floorboards. Maybe that would be next.
The hardcopies of Dr. Taillebois’s original presentation were stacked neatly on tables in the lobby. I took one in English. As I went out the door, I heard a gendarme say clearly to somebody, “Oui, il s’a suicide, Dr. Taillebois.”
I didn’t want to stay an hour longer in Paris. I packed at the hotel and changed my ticket at Orly. On the plane home I made myself read the Taillebois/Erbland paper. Most of it was incomprehensible to me; what I understood was obscene. I kept seeing Marguerite in her pink ballet slippers, Caroline staggering on stage. If my lack of sympathy for Taillebois and Erbland was a lack in me, then so be it.
For the first time since Deborah had entered the School of American Ballet, and despite the dazzling performances at the Paris Opera, I found myself respecting Anton Privitera.
When I landed at Kennedy, at almost midnight, there was a message from the electronic gate keeper, “Call this number immediately. Urgent and crucial.” I didn’t recognize the number.
Deborah. An accident. I raced to the nearest public phone. But it wasn’t a hospital; it was an attorney’s office.
“Ms. Susan Matthews? Hold, please.”
A man’s face came on the screen. “This is James Beecher, Ms. Matthews. I’m attorney for Pers Anders. He’s being held without bail, pending trial. He left a message for you, most urgent. The message is—”
“Trial? On what charges?” But I think I already knew. The well-cut suit on the lawyer. The move to an expensive neighborhood. Pers was working for somebody, and there weren’t very many things he knew how to do.
“The charges are dealing in narcotics. First-degree felony. The message is—”
“Sunshine, right? No, that wouldn’t have been expensive enough for Pers,” I said bitterly. “Designer viruses? Pleasure center beanos?”
“The message is, ‘Don’t look in the caverns of the moon.’ That’s all.” The screen went blank.
I stared at it anyway. When Deborah was tiny, in the brief period a million years ago when Pers and I were still together and raising her, she had a game she loved. She’d hide a favorite toy somewhere and call out, “Don’t look in the closet! Don’t look under the bed! Don’t look in the sock drawer!” The toy was always wherever she said not to look. The caverns of the moon was what she called her bedroom, but that was much later, long after Pers had deserted us both but before she tracked him down in New York. I didn’t know that he even knew about it.
Don’t look in the caverns of the moon.
I took a helo right to the Central Park landing stage, charging it to the magazine. The last five blocks I ran, past the automated stores that never sleep and the night people who had just gotten up. Deborah wasn’t home; she didn’t expect me back from Paris until tomorrow. I tore apart her bedroom, and in an old dance bag I found it, flattened between the mattress and box spring. No practiced criminal, my Deborah.
The powder was pinkish, with no particular odor. There was a lot of it. I had no idea what it was; probably it had a unique name to go with a unique formula matched to some brain function. What kind of father would use his own daughter as a courier for this designer-gene abyss? Would the cops have already have been here if I’d come home a day later? An hour later?
I flushed it all down the toilet, including the dance bag, which I first cut into tiny pieces. Then I searched the rest of the apartment, and then I searched it again. There were no more drugs. There was no money.
She wasn’t running stuff for Pers for free. Not Deborah. She had spent the money somewhere.
“They asked me to join the company! He said it was very nice! He said I was much improved!”
I made myself sit and think. It was one o’clock in the morning. Lincoln Center would be locked and dark. She might be at a restaurant with other dancers; she might be staying the night with a friend. I called other SAB students. Each answered sleepily. Deborah wasn’t there. Ninette told me that after the evening performance Deborah had said she was going home.
“Well, yes, Ms. Matthews, she did seem a little tense,” Ninette said, stifling a yawn, her long hair tousled on the shoulders of her nightgown. “But it was only her second night in actual performance, so I thought . . .” The young voice trailed off. I wasn’t going to be told whatever this girl thought. Clearly I was an interfering mother.
You bet I was.
I waited another hour. Deborah didn’t come home. I called a cab and went to Caroline Olson’s apartment on Central Park South.
It had to be Caroline. She must have known she herself was bioenhanced, and I had seen her dance before her downfall: the complete abandon to ballet, the joy. Maybe she thought that helping other dancers to illegal bioenhancement was a favor to them, a benefit. She might be making a distinction—the same one Dr. Erbland had made—between the ultimately destructive re-engineering done to her in vitro and the bioenhancements done to European dancers. Or maybe she didn’t connect her own sudden deterioration with how her mother had genetically consecrated her to ballet.
Or maybe she did. Maybe she knew that her meteoric success was what was now killing her. Maybe she was so sick and so enraged that she wanted to destroy other dancers along with her. If she couldn’t dance out her full career, then neither would they.
Or maybe she thought it was worth it. A short life but a brilliant one. Anything for art. Most dancers ended up crippling their bodies anyway, although more slowly. The great Suzanne Farrell had ended up with a plastic hip, her pelvis destroyed by constant turnout. Mikhail Baryshnikov ruined his knees. Miranda Mains was unable to walk by the time she was twenty-eight. Maybe Caroline Olson thought no sacrifice was too great for ballet, even a life.
But not my Deborah’s.
I buzzed the security system of Caroline’s apartment for five solid minutes. There was no answer. Finally the system said politely, “Your party does not answer. Further buzzing may constitute legal harrassment. You should leave now.”
I got back in the cab, chewing on my thumb. I felt that kind of desperation you think you can’t live through; it consumes your belly, chokes your breath. The driver waited indifferently. Where? God, in New York they could be anywhere.
Anywhere nobody would think to look for illegal genetic operations. Anywhere safe, and protected, and easily accessible by dancers, without suspicion.
I gave the driver Anna Olson’s address, remembered from the tax return pirated by the Robin Hood. Then I transferred the gun from my purse to my pocket.
I think I wasn’t quite sane.
9.
Caroline and I ride in a taxi. I like taxis. I put my head out the window. The taxi has many smells. We stop at Deborah’s house. Caroline and I go get Deborah.
“I’ve changed my mind,” Deborah says. Her door is open only a little. She stands behind her door. “I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are,” Caroline says.
Deborah says, “You’re not my mother!”
Caroline changes her smell. She has a cane to walk. She leans on her cane. Her voice gets soft. “No, I’m not your mother. And I’m not going to push you like a mother. Believe me, Deborah, I know what that’s like. But as a senior dancer, I’m going to ask you to come with me. I’m willing to beg you to come. It’s that important. Not just to you, but to me.”
Deborah looks at the floor.
“Don’t be embarrassed. Just understand that I mean it. I’ll beg, I’ll grovel. But first I’m asking, as a senior member of the company.” Deborah looks up. She smells angry. “Why do you care? It’s my life!”
“Yes. Yours and Privitera’s.” Caroline closes her eyes. “You owe him something, too. No, don’t conside
r that. Just come because I’m asking you.”
Deborah still smells angry. But she comes.
We ride in the taxi to Caroline’s mother’s house. I say, “Is there a party tonight?”
Deborah laughs. It sounds funny. Caroline says, “Yes, Angel. Another party. With music and dancers and talking. And you can have some pretzels.”
“I like pretzels,” I say. “Does Deborah like pretzels?”
“No,” Deborah says, and now she smells scared.
We go in the back way. Caroline has a key. People come to the basement. Someone starts music. “Not so loud!” a man says.
“No, it’s all right,” Caroline says. “My mother’s still in Europe, and the staff is on vacation while she’s gone. We have the place to ourselves.”
A woman brings me a pretzel. People talk. Caroline and Deborah and two men talk in the corner. I don’t hear the words. The words at parties are very hard. I watch Caroline, and eat pretzels, and watch two people dance to the radio.
“Christ,” the man dancer says, “is this fake revelry really necessary?”
“Yes,” the woman says. She looks at me. “Caroline says yes.”
In the corner, two men show Deborah some papers. Caroline sits with them. Deborah starts to cry.
I watch Caroline. Deborah may touch Caroline. The two men may touch Caroline. But Caroline says parties are happy. No people smell happy. I do not understand.
The buzzer rings.
Nobody moves. People look at each other. Caroline says, “Is the gate still open? Let it go. It’s probably kids. There’s nobody home but us.”
The buzzer rings and rings. Then it stops. Caroline talks to Deborah. The door opens at the top of the stairs.
A man with Caroline takes a bottle from his pocket very fast. He puts the papers on the floor and pours the bottle on it. The papers disappear. “All right, everybody, this is a party,” he says.
Steps run down the stairs. A voice calls, “Wait! You can’t go down there! Young woman! You can’t go down there!” The voice is angry. It is Caroline’s mother.
