Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I walk to Caroline. She smells surprised.

  A woman comes into the basement. She holds a gun. My ears raise. I stand next to Caroline.

  “Nobody move,” the woman says. Deborah says, “Mom!”

  Caroline looks at the woman, then at Deborah, then at the woman. She walks with her cane to the woman.

  “Stay right there,” the woman says. She smells angry and scared. I move with Caroline.

  “Christ, you sound like a bad holovid,” Caroline says. “You’re Deborah’s mother? What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

  From the top of the stairs Caroline’s mother calls, “Caroline! What is the meaning of this?”

  The woman says very fast, “Deborah, you’re making a terrible mistake. Bioenhancement may help your dancing for a while, but it could also kill you. The conference on genetics in Paris—they presented scientific proof that one kind of bioenhancement kills, and if they’re just finding that out know about enhancements done twenty-five years ago—then who knows what kind of insane risk you’re running with these other kinds? Don’t take my word for it, it’s online this morning. Pers was arrested, damn him, and I found your drug stash just before the police did. That’s how you’re paying for this, isn’t it? Debbie—how could you be such a damn fool?”

  “Wait a minute,” Caroline says. She leans on her cane. “You thought we brought Deborah here to bioenhance her?” Caroline starts to laugh. She puts her hand on her face. “Oh my God!”

  Caroline’s mother calls from the top of the stairs, “I’m phoning the police.”

  Caroline says, very fast, “Go bring her down here, James. You’ll have to lift her out of her chair and carry her. Keith, get her chair.” The two men run up the stairs.

  Caroline is shaking. I stand beside her. I growl. The woman still has the gun. She points the gun at Caroline. I wait for Caroline to tell me Attack.

  The woman says, “Don’t try to deny it. You’d do anything for ballet, wouldn’t you? All of you. You’re sick—but you’re not murdering my daughter!”

  Caroline’s face changes. Her smell changes. I feel her hand on my head. Her hand shakes. Her body shakes. I smell anger bigger than other angers. I wait for Attack.

  Deborah says, “You’re all wrong, Mom! Just like you always are! Does this look like a bioenhancement lab? Does it? These people aren’t enhancing me—they’re trying to talk me out of it! These two guys are doctors and they’re trying to ‘deprogram’ me—just like you tried to program me all my life! You never wanted me to dance, you always tried to make me into this cute little college-bound student that you needed me to be. Never what I needed!”

  The men carry Caroline’s mother and Caroline’s mother’s chair down the steps. They put Caroline’s mother in the chair. Caroline’s mother also smells angry. But Caroline smells more angry than everybody.

  Caroline says, “Sound familiar, Mother dear? What Deborah’s saying? What did you learn at the genetic conference? What I’ve been telling you for months, right? Your gift to dance is dying. Because you wanted a prima ballerina at any price. Even if I’m the one to pay it.” Caroline’s mother says, “You love dance. You wanted it as much as I did. You were a star.”

  “I never got to find out if I would have been one anyway! That isn’t so inconceivable, is it? And then I might have still been dancing! But instead I was . . . made. Molded, sewed, carpentered. Into what you needed me to be.”

  Deborah’s mother lowers her gun. Her eyes are big. Caroline’s mother says, “You were a star. You had a good run. Without me, you might have been nothing. Worthless.”

  A man says, very soft, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Caroline is shaking hard. I am afraid she will fall again. Her hand is on her cane. The cane shakes. Her other hand is on me.

  Caroline says, “You cold, self-centered bitch—”

  A little girl runs down the stairs.

  The little girl says, “Tante Annal Tante Anna! Ou etes-vous?” She stops at the bottom of the steps. She smells afraid. “Qui sont tout ces gens?”

  Caroline looks at the little girl. The little girl has no shoes. She has long black fur on her head. Her hind feet go out like Caroline’s feet when Caroline dances. The toes look strange. I don’t understand the little girl’s feet.

  Caroline says again, “You cold, self-centered bitch.” Her voice is soft now. She stops shaking. “When did you have her made? Five years ago? Six? A new model with improved features? Who will decay all the sooner?”

  Caroline’s mother says, “You are a hysterical fool.”

  Caroline says, “Angel—attack. Now.”

  I attack Caroline’s mother. I knock over the chair. I bite her foreleg. Someone screams, “Caroline! For God’s sake! Caroline!” I bite Caroline’s mother’s head. I must protect Caroline. This person hurts Caroline. I must protect Caroline.

  A gun fires and I hurt and hurt and hurt—

  I love Caroline.

  10.

  The town of Saratoga, where the American Ballet Theater is dancing its summer season, is itself a brightly colored stage. Visitors throng the racetrack, the brand-new Electronics Museum, the historical battle sites. In 1777, right here, Benedict Arnold and his half-trained revolutionaries stopped British forces under General John Burgoyne. It was the first great victory of freedom over the old order.

  Until this year, the New York City Ballet danced here every summer. But the Performing Arts Center chose not to renew the City Ballet contract. In New York, too, City Ballet attendance is half of what it was only a few years ago.

  The Saratoga pavillion is open to the countryside. Ballet lovers fill the seats, spread blankets up the sloping lawn, watch dancers accompanied not only by Tchaikovsky or Chopin but also by crickets and robins. In Saratoga, the ballet smells of freshly mown grass. The classic “white ballets”—Swan Lake, Les Sylphides—are remembered green. Small girls whose first taste of dance is at Saratoga will dream, for the rest of their life, of toe shoes skimming over wildflowers.

  I take my seat, in the back of the regular seating, as the small orchestra finishes tuning up. The conductor enters to the usual thunderous applause, even though nobody here knows his name and very few care. They have come to see the dancers.

  Debussy floats out over the countryside. Afternoon of a Faun: slow, melting. On the nearly bare stage, furnished only with barre and mirrors, a male dancer in practice clothes wakes up, stretches, warms up his muscles in a series of low, languorous moves.

  A girl appears in the mirror, which isn’t really a mirror but an empty place in the backdrop. A void. She, too, stretches, poses, plies. Both dancers watch the mirrors. They are so absorbed in their own reflections that they only gradually become aware of each other’s presence. Even then, they exist for each other only as foils, presences to dance to. In the end the girl will step back through the mirror. There is the feeling that for the boy, she may not really have existed at all, except as a dream.

  It is Deborah’s first lead in a one-act ballet. Her extension is high, her turnout perfect, her movements sure and strong and sustained, filled with the joy of dancing. I can barely stand to look at her. This is her reward, her grail, for continuing her bioenhancement. She isn’t dancing for Anton Privitera, but she is dancing. A year and a half of bioenhancement, bought legally now in Copenhagen and paid for by selling her story to an eager press, has given her the physical possibilities to match her musicality, and her rhythm, and her drive.

  The faun finally touches the girl, turning her slowly en attitude. Deborah smiles. This is her afternoon. She’s willing to pay whatever price the night demands, even though science has no idea yet what, for her kind of treatments, it might be.

  Privitera must have known that some of his dancers were bioenhanced. The completely inadequate bioscans at City Ballet, the phenomenally low injury rate of his prima ballerina—Privitera must have known. Or maybe his staff let him remain in official ignorance, keeping from him any knowledge of heresy in
the ranks. There was a rumor that Privitera’s business manager John Coles even tried to keep Caroline from “deprogramming” dancers who wanted bioenhancement. The rumor about Coles was never substantiated. But in the last year, City Ballet has been struggling to survive. Too many patrons have withdrawn their favor. The mystique of natural art, like other mystiques, didn’t last forever. It had a good run.

  “If you could have chosen, and that was the only way you could have had the career, would you have chosen the embryonic engineering anyway?” was the sole thing Deborah asked Caroline in jail, through bullet-proof plastic glass and electronic speaking systems, under the hard eyes of matrons. Caroline, awaiting trial for second-degree murder, didn’t seem to mind Deborah’s brusqueness, her self-absorption. Caroline was silent a long time, her gaunt face lengthened from the girlish roundness I remembered. Then she said to Deborah, “No.”

  “I would,” Deborah said.

  Caroline only looked at her.

  They’re here, Caroline and her dog. Somewhere up on the grass, Caroline in a powerchair, Angel hobbling on the three legs my bullet left him. Caroline was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. They didn’t let Angel stay with her during the trial. Nor did they let him testify, which would have been abnormal but not impossible. Five-year-olds can testify under some circumstances, and Angel has the biochip-and-reengineered intelligence of a five-year-old. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so abnormal. Or maybe all of us, not just Anton Privitera, will have to change our definition of abnormal.

  Five-year-olds know a lot. It was Marguerite who cried out, “Vous avez assassine ma tante Anna!” She knew whom I was aiming at, even if the police did not. But Marguerite couldn’t know how much I loathed the old woman who had made her daughter into what the mother needed her to be—just as I, out of love, had tried to do to mine.

  On stage Deborah pirouettes. Maybe her types of bioenhancement will be all right, despite the growing body of doubts collected by Caroline’s doctor allies. When the first cures for cancer were developed from reengineered retroviruses, dying and desperate patients demanded they be administered without long, drawn-out FDA testing. Some of the patients died even sooner, possibly from the cures. Some lived until ninety. The edge of anything is a lottery, and protection doesn’t help—not against change, or madmen, or errors of judgement. I protect Caroline, Angel kept saying after I shot him, yelping in pain between sentences. I protect Caroline.

  Deborah flows into a retire, one leg bent at the knee, and rises on toe. Her face glows. Her partner lifts her above his head and turns her slowly, her feet perfectly arched in their toe shoes, dancing on air.

  GRANT US THIS DAY

  The author’s April 1992 short story, “The Mountain to Mohammed,” which was a finalist for the Nebula award, has just been nominated for the Hugo. Ms. Kress returns to our pages with a cosmjc look at creation as art.

  When I finally found God, he was slumped at the counter in a Detroit diner, stirring his coffee. The dissolving creamer made little spiral galaxies. He had a bad sunburn. I slid onto the next stool. “God?”

  He looked up. A little gray flecked his dark beard but on the whole he looked younger than I’d expected. Maybe thirty. Maybe twenty-eight. His jeans were grimy. “Who wants to know?”

  “Daniel Smith.” I held out my hand. He didn’t take it. “Listen, God, I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  He said, “You got to read me my rights.”

  “What?”

  “My Miranda rights. I know I screwed up, all right? But at least do it by the local rules. Let’s get at least one part of this right.”

  “I’m not a cop,” I said.

  “Not a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Just my luck.” He slumped even lower on the stool, elbows resting on the counter, which bore some deep indescribable stain the shape of Africa. God traced it with one finger. Two teenage boys banged noisily through the front door; the waitress eyed them warily. “Then you’re a divinity student, right? Colgate? Loyola?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t find some ancient manuscript proving I exist in corporeal form?”

  “No.” The boys slid into a corner booth. Their jackets rode up, and I caught the flash of steel.

  “You didn’t consult a lama in a monastery on top of a Tibetan mountain—old, most old?”

  “Not that either.”

  God sipped his coffee and made a face. “Then who the hell are you?”

  “I’m from the Committee.”

  Even with his sunburn, he paled. “Oh, man.”

  “Well, that was one of the problems, certainly.”

  God slammed his spoon onto the counter and sat up straight. “Look, I know I screwed up. I know it has problems. I’ve already admitted that.” He glanced around the diner. In the booth opposite the boys, a hooker sat with an enormously fat man eating a taco salad. He talked with his mouth full; she was asleep. The fat man hadn’t noticed. The waitress limped past, carrying a platter of greasy burgers. She had one leg shorter than the other.

  “Nonetheless,” God said, surly now, “from the Committee’s viewpoint I did everything right, so why bother me, man? I filled out the application in triplicate. I listed my previous work. I filed by the deadline. I submitted work that met your bureaucratic guidelines: neatness, originality, aptness of thought. What’s more original than kangaroos? Or a hundred years’ war? A hundred years for a single war! So why hassle me now?”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking at the fat man, who had noticed the hooker was asleep and was kicking her viciously, “you could have worked a little harder on ‘neatness.’ ”

  “Yeah, well, everybody’s a critic.” He slumped again, his brief surliness over. I couldn’t read the expression on his face. “But that still doesn’t explain what you’re doing here. I know I didn’t make the finals. I saw the list.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He rubbed his nose; it really was a wicked sunburn. It was going to peel something awful.

  I said, “The list’s changed. One finalist withdrew. You were the first name on the waiting list.”

  His eyes opened wide. “Really? Who withdrew?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say. But now you’re on the short list.”

  God bent his head to stare into his coffee. The flush on his neck wasn’t all sunburn. This means so damn much to some of them. The waitress delivered the burgers to an old couple at a center table, both of them thin and quavery as parchment.

  He said, “So what happens now?”

  “The rules say you have a thousand years to revise, before the next round of voting. Off the record, let me say I think you should consider fairly substantial revision. The Committee liked certain aspects of your work, but the consensus was that the tone is uneven, and the whole lacks coherence.”

  “I’m not creating some cheap commercial piece here!”

  “I know that. And nobody says you should. But still, any good work has a voice all its own, a coherence, a thematic pattern that clearly identifies the artist. Your work here—well, frankly, son, it’s all over the map. The pieces don’t adhere. The proportions are skewed. It lacks balance and unity.”

  God signaled for a piece of pie. The waitress limped over from the center table, where the old couple were holding hands. The fat man spoke low and fast to the hooker, leaning forward, his mouth twisted. The boys passed a plastic bag across the table, smirking at the room, daring anyone to notice.

  God said, “I can’t just—”

  I held up my hand placatingly, “I know, I know—you can’t just compromise your artistic integrity. And nobody’s asking you to. Just be a little more consistent in tone and imagery.”

  God said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s not a question of artistic integrity. Not really.” He leaned closer, suddenly earnest. I wondered if he had any ointment for that nose. “See—there’s a spectrum you can work along. Call it ‘intended meaning
fulness.’ At one end you have your absurdist pieces. Things happen in an unconnected manner. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is rational. Godot never shows.” He smiled.

  I didn’t get the reference. Probably to his own work. Some of these guys think the grant Committee memorizes their every detail. The door opened on a gust of wind and a cop entered. The waitress brought God cherry pie on a thick beige plate.

  “I don’t think much of absurdist stuff,” he continued. “I mean, where’s the art? If literally anything can happen, why bother? But at the other end is all that tight moral order. Punish the bad, reward the good, solve the mysteries, give every act simple-minded motives and rational outcomes. B-o-r-i-n-g. And not all that just or compassionate, either, no matter what those artists say. What’s so compassionate about imposing a single pattern on the lion and the ox? Or on the worm in the heart of the rose, for that matter?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so self-referential. It’s an annoying mannerism.”

  “But you get my point.”

  “Yes, I do. You go for texture. And density. And diversity. All commendable. But not very commercial.”

  “I didn’t think this was supposed to be a commercial competition!”

  “It’s not,” I said. “But do you realize how many mediocre artists out there justify their mediocrity by their lack of accessibility? Just because they’re not commercial doesn’t mean they’re grandly above all standards and judgements. Not every finger twitch is sacred just because it’s theirs.”

  “That’s true.” God slumped on his stool a third time. He certainly was a volatile kid. But honest. Not many can see the line between selfjustification and true originality. I started to like him. The cop took a seat at the end of the counter. The boys flipped the finger at his back. The hooker wept softly. Her mascara smudged under her eyes.

  “Look, son,” I said, “don’t take criticism so hard. Instead, use it. You’re still in the running, and you’ve got a thousand years. Rework the more outre stuff to bring it in line with your major themes. Tone down your use of color. Make the ending a little clearer. That’s all I’m suggesting. Give yourself a fighting chance.”