Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Jane said, “Let’s begin then, Ishmael, if it’s all right with you.”

  “It’s fine with me,” he said. His back was to the harsh light, which fell full on both Jane and Ms. Resentful. The latter had bad skin, small eyes, lanky hair, although her lips were lovely, full and red, and her neck above the windbreaker had the taut firmness of youth.

  The light was harder on Jane. It showed up the crow’s feet, the tired inelasticity of her skin under her flawless make-up. She was, after all, fifty-four, and she’d never gone under the knife. Also, she’d never been really beautiful, not as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones had once been beautiful. Jane’s features were too irregular, her legs and butt too heavy. But none of that mattered next to the smile, the voice, the green eyes fresh as new grass, and the powerful sexual glow she gave off so effortlessly. It’s as if Jane Snow somehow received two sets of female genes at conception, a critic wrote once, doubling everything we think of as “feminine.” That makes her either a goddess or a freak.

  “I’m preparing for a role in a new movie,” she said to Ishmael, although of course he already knew that. She just wanted to use her voice on him. “It’s going to be about your . . . your organization. And about the future of the little girls. I’ve talked to some of them and—”

  “Which ones?” Ms. Resentful demanded.

  Did she really know them all by name? I looked at her more closely. Intelligence in those small, stony eyes. She could be from the Group’s headquarter cell—wherever it was—and sent to ensure that Ishmael didn’t screw up this meeting. Or not. But if she were really intelligent, would she be so enamored of someone like Ishmael?

  Stupid question. Three of Jane’s four husbands had been gorgeous losers. Jane said, “Well, so far I’ve only talked to Rima Ridley-Jones. But Friday I have the whole afternoon with the Barrington twins.”

  Ishmael, unwilling to have the conversation migrate from him, said, “Beautiful children, those twins. And very intelligent.” As if the entire world didn’t already know that. Unlike most of the Group’s handiwork, the Barrington twins had been posed by their publicity-hound parents on every magazine cover in the world. But Jane smiled at Ishmael as if he’d just explicated Spinoza.

  “Yes, they are beautiful. Please, Ishmael, tell me about your organization. Anything that might help me prepare for my role in Future Perfect.”

  He leaned forward, hands on his knees, handsome face intent. Dramatically, insistently, he intoned, “There is one thing you must understand about the Group, Jane. A very critical thing. You will never stop us.”

  Portentous silence.

  The worst thing was, he might be right. The FBI, CIA, IRS, HPA, and several other alphabets had lopped off a few heads, but still the hydra grew. It had so many supporters: liberal lawmakers and politicians, who wanted the Anti-Genetic Modification Act revoked and the Human Protection Agency dismantled. The rich parents who wanted their embryos enhanced. The off-shore banks that coveted the Group’s dollars and the Caribbean or Mexican or who-knows-what islands that benefited from sheltering their mobile labs.

  “We are idealists,” Ishmael droned on, “and we are the future. Through our efforts, mankind will change for the better. Wars will end, cruelty will disappear. When people can—”

  “Let me interrupt you for just a moment, Ishmael.” Jane widened her eyes and over-used his name. Her dewy look up at him from the floor could have reversed desertification. She was pulling out all the stops.

  “I need so much to understand, Ishmael. If you genemod these little girls, one by one, you end up changing such a small percentage of the human race that . . . how many children have been engineered with Arlen’s Syndrome?”

  “We prefer the term ‘Arlen’s Advantage.’ ”

  “Yes, of course. How many children?”

  I held my breath. The Group had never given out that information.

  Jane put an entreating hand on Ishmael’s knee.

  He said loftily, hungrily, “That information is classified,” and I saw that he didn’t know the answer. Ms. Resentful said, “To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen.”

  Was she lying? My instincts—and I have very good instincts, although to say that in this context is clearly a joke—said no. Resentful knew the number. So she was higher up than Ishmael. And since she sure as hell wasn’t responding to Jane’s allure, that meant the Group now wanted the numbers made public.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Ishmael said hastily, “three thousand two hundred fourteen children.” Jane said, “But that’s not a high percentage out of six billion people on Earth, is it? It—”

  “Five ten-millionth of 1 percent,” I said. A silly, self-indulgent display, but what the hell. My legs ached. She always could ad-lib. “Yes, thank you, Barry. But my question was for Ishmael. If only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses Arlen’s Advantage, even if the genemod turns out to be inheritable—”

  “It is,” Ishmael said, which was nonsense. The oldest Arlen’s kids were only twelve.

  “Wonderful!” Jane persisted. “But as I say, if only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses the Advantage, how can the Group hope to alter the entire human future?” Ishmael covered her hand with his. He smiled down at her, and his eyes actually twinkled. “Jane, Jane, Jane. Have you ever dropped a pebble into a pond?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened, my dear?”

  “A ripple.”

  “Which spread and spread until the entire pond was affected!” Ishmael spread his arms wide. The ass couldn’t even put together a decent analogy. Humanity was an ocean, not a pond, and water ripples were always transitory. But Jane, actress that she was, beamed at him and moved the conversation to something he could handle.

  “I see. Tell me, Ishmael, how you personally became involved in the Group.” He was thrilled to talk about himself. As he did, Jane skillfully extracted information about the Group’s make-up, its organization, its communications methods. Resentful let her do it. I watched the young woman, who was watching Ishmael but not in a monitoring sort of way. He couldn’t give away really critical information; he didn’t have any. Still, he talked too much. He was the kind of man who responded to an audience, who could easily become so expansive that he turned indiscreet. Sooner or later, I suspected, he would say something to somebody that he shouldn’t, and the Group would dump him. Ms. Resentful wasn’t anything near the actress Jane that was. Her hunger for this worthless man was almost palpable. I might have felt sympathy for her pain if my own wasn’t increasing so much in my legs, back, neck. I seldom sat this long, and never on a hard chair.

  My particular brand of dwarfism, achondroplasia, accounts for 70 percent of all cases. Malformed bones and cartilage produce not only the short limbs, big head and butt, and pushed-in face that all the media caricaturists so adore but also, in some of us, constriction of the spinal canal that causes pain. Especially as achons age, and I was only two years younger than Jane. Multiple excruciating operations have only helped me so much.

  After an hour and a half, Jane rose, her filmy skirt swirling around her lovely calves. My uneasiness spiked sharply. If anything was going to happen, it would be now.

  But nothing did happen. The masked boy reappeared and we were led out of the dingy basement. I could barely walk. Jane knew better than to help me, but she whispered, “I’m so sorry, Barry. But this was my only chance.”

  “I know.” Somehow I made it up the stairs. We navigated the maze of the abandoned warehouse, where the Group’s unseen soldiers stayed at stand-off with our own unseen bodyguards. Blinking in the sunlight, I suddenly collapsed onto the broken concrete.

  “Barry!”

  “It’s . . . okay. Don’t.”

  “The rest will be so much easier . . . I promise!”

  I got myself upright, or what passes for upright. The unmarked van arrived for us. The whole insane interview had gone off without a hitch, without violence, smooth as good chocolate. So why
did I still feel so uneasy?

  An hour later, Jane’s image appeared all over the Net, the TV, the wallboards. Her words had been edited to appear that she was a supporter, perhaps even a member, of the Group. But of course we had anticipated this. The moment our van left the warehouse, the first of the pre-emptory spots I’d prepared aired everywhere. They featured news avatar CeeCee Collins, who was glad for the scoop, interviewing Jane about her meeting. Dedicated actress preparing for a role, willing to take any personal risk for art, not a believer in breaking the law but valuing open discourse on this important issue, and so forth. The spots cost us a huge amount of money. They were worth it. Not only was the criticism defused, but the publicity for the upcoming movie, which started principal photography in less than a month, was beyond price.

  I didn’t watch my spots play. Nor was I there when the FBI, CIA, HPA, etc. paid Jane the expected visit to both “debrief” her and/or threaten her with arrest for meeting with terrorists. But I didn’t need to be there. Before our meeting, I’d gotten Jane credentials under the Malvern-Murphy Press Immunity Act, plus Everett Murphy as her more-than-capable lawyer. Everett monitored the interviews and I stayed in bed under a painkiller. The FBI, CIA, HPA wanted to meet with me, too, of course, once Jane told them I’d been present. They had to wait until I could see them. I didn’t mind them cooling their heels as they waited for me, not at all.

  Why are you so opposed to genemods? Jane had asked me once, and only once, not looking at me as she said it. She meant, Why you, especially? Usually I answered Jane, trusted Jane, but not on this. I told her the truth: You wouldn’t understand. To her credit, she hadn’t been offended. Jane was smart enough to know what she didn’t know.

  Now, on my lovely pain patch, I floated in a world where she and I walked hand in hand through a forest the green of her filmy skirt, and she had to crane her neck to smile up at me.

  The next few days, publicity for the picture exploded. Jane did interview after interview: TV, LinkNet, robocam, print, holonews. She glowed with the attention, looking ten years younger. Some of the interviewers and avatars needled her, but she stuck to the studio line: This is a movie about people, not polemics. Future Perfect is not really about genetic engineering. It will be an honest examination of eternal verities, of our shared frailty and astonishing shared strength, of what makes us human, of blah blah blah, that just happens to use Arlen’s Syndrome as a vehicle. The script was nearly finished and it would be complex and realistic and blah blah blah.

  “Pro or con on genemods?” an exasperated journalist finally shouted from the back of the room. Jane gave him a dazzling smile. “Complex and realistic,” she said.

  Both the pros and the cons would be swarming into the theater, unstoppable as lemmings. I felt so good about all of this that I decided to call Leila. I needed to be in a good mood to stand these calls. Leila wasn’t home, letting me get away with just a message, which made me feel even better. Jane, glowing on camera, was wiping out a decade of cinematic obscurity with Future Perfect. I couldn’t wipe out my fifteen years of guilt that easily, nor would I do so even if I could. But I was still glad that Leila wasn’t home.

  Jane had promised that Friday’s role-prep interview would be easier on me. She was wrong. The Barrington twins lived with their parents and teen-age sister in San Luis Obispo. Jane’s pilot obtained clearance to land on the green-velvet Barrington lawn, well behind the estate’s heavily secured walls. I wouldn’t have to walk far.

  “Welcome, Miss Snow. An honor.” Frieda Barrington was mutton dressed as lamb, a fiftyish woman in a brief skirt and peek-a-boo caped sweater. Slim, toned, tanned, but the breasts doing the peek-a-booing would never be twenty again, and her face had the tense lines of those who spent most of their waking time pretending not to be tense.

  Jane climbed gracefully from the flyer and stood so that her body shielded my awkward descent. I seized the grab bar, sat on the flyer floor, fell heavily onto the grass, and scrambled to my feet. Jane moved aside, her calf-length skirt—butter yellow, this time—blowing in the slight breeze. “Call me Jane. This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

  Frieda Barrington was one of Those. Still, she at least tried to conceal her distaste. “Hello, Mr. Tenler.”

  “Hi.” With any luck, this would be the only syllable I had to address to her. We walked across the grass through perfect landscaping, Frieda supplying the fund of inane chatter that such women always have at their disposal. The house had been built a hundred years earlier for a silent-film star. Huge, pink, gilded at windows and doors, it called to mind an obese lawn flamingo. We entered a huge foyer floored in black-and-white marble, which managed to look less Vermeer than checkerboard. A sulky girl in dirty jeans lounged on a chaise longue. She stared at us over the garish cover of a comic book.

  “Suky, get up,” Frieda snapped. “This is Miss Snow and her manager Mr., uh, Tangler. My daughter Suky.”

  The girl got up, made an ostentatious and mocking curtsey, and lay down again. Frieda made a noise of outrage and embarrassment, but I felt sorry for Suky. Fifteen—the same age as Ethan—plain of face, she was caught between a mother who’d appropriated her fashions and twin sisters who appropriated all the attention. Frieda would be lucky if Suky’s rebellion stopped at mere rudeness. I made her a mock little bow to match her curtsey, and watched as her eyes widened with surprise. I grinned. Frieda snapped, “Where are the twins?”

  Suky shrugged. Frieda rolled her eyes and led us through the house.

  They were playing on the terrace, a sun-shaded sweep of weathered stone with steps that led to more lawn, all backed by a gorgeous view of vineyards below the Sierra Madres. Frieda settled us on comfortable, padded chairs. A robo-server rolled up, offering lemonade. Bridget and Belinda came over to us before they were called. “Hello!” Jane said with her melting smile, but neither girl answered. Instead, they gazed steadily, unblinkingly at her for a full thirty seconds, and then did the same with me. I didn’t like it, or them.

  Arlen’s Syndrome, like all genetic tinkering, has side effects. No one knows that better than I. Achondroplasia dwarfism is the result of a single nucleotide substitution in the gene FGFR3 at codon 380

  on chromosome 4. It affects the growth of bones and cartilage, which in turn affects air passages, nerves, and other people’s tolerance. Exactly which genes were involved in Arlen’s were a trade secret, but the modifications undoubtedly spread across many genes, with many side effects. But since only females could be genemod for Arlen’s, the X chromosome was one of those altered. That much, at least, was known.

  The two eleven-year-old girls staring at me so frankly were small for their age, delicately built: fairy children. They had white skin, silky fair hair cut in short caps, and eyes of luminous gray. Other than that, they didn’t look much alike, fraternal twins rather than identical. Bridget was shorter, plumper, prettier. From a Petri-dishful of Frieda’s fertilized eggs, the Barringtons had chosen the most promising two, had them genemoded for Arlen’s Syndrome, and implanted them in Frieda’s ageing but still serviceable womb. The loving parents, both exhibitionists, had splashed across the worldwide media every last detail—except where and how the work had been done. Unlike Rima Ridley-Jones, the Arlen’s child that Jane had spoken with last week, these two were carefully manufactured celebrities. Jane tried again. “I’m Jane Snow, and you’re Bridget and Belinda. I’m glad to meet you.”

  “Yes,” Belinda said, “you are.” She looked at me. “But you’re not.” There was no point in lying. Not to them. “Not particularly.”

  Bridget said, with a gentleness surprising in one so young, “That’s okay, though.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I didn’t say it was okay,” Belinda said.

  There was no answer to that. The Ridley-Jones child hadn’t behaved like this; in addition to shielding her from the media, her mother had taught her manners. Frieda, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair like a spectator at a play, interested i
n what her amazing daughters would say next, but with anxiety on overdrive. I had the sense she’d been here before. Eleven-year-olds were no longer adorable, biddable toddlers.

  “You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me, at the same moment that Bridget put a hand on her sister’s arm. Belinda shook it off. “Let me alone, Brid. He should know. They all should know.” She smiled at me and I felt something in my chest recoil from the look in her gray eyes.

  “You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me with that horrible smile. “No matter what you do, Jane will never love you. And she’ll always hate it when you touch her even by mistake. Just like she hates it now. Hates it, hates it, hates it.”

  It started with a dog.

  Dr. Kenneth Bernard Arlen, a geneticist and chess enthusiast, owned a toy poodle. Poodles are a smart breed. Arlen played chess twice a week in his Stanford apartment with Kelson Hughes from Zoology. Usually they played three, four, or five games in a row, depending on how careless Hughes got with his end game. Cosette lay on the rug, dozing, until checkmate of the last game, when she always began barking frantically to protest Hughes’s leaving. The odd thing was that Cosette began barking before the men rose, as they replaced the chessmen for what might, after all, have been the start of just another game. How did she know it wasn’t?

  Hughes assumed pheromones. He, or Arlen, or both, probably gave off a different smell as they decided to call it a night. Pheromones were Hughes’s field of research; he’d done significant work in mate selection among mice based on smell. He had a graduate student remove the glomeruli from adult dogs and put them through tests to see how various of their learned responses to humans changed. The responses didn’t change. It wasn’t pheromones.

  Now not only Hughes but also Arlen was intensely intrigued. The Human Genome Project had just slid into Phase 2, discovering which genes encoded for what proteins, and how. Arlen was working with Turner’s Syndrome, a disorder in which females were born missing all or part of one of their two X chromosomes. The girls had not only physical problems but social ones; they seemed to have trouble with even simple social interactions. What interested Hughes was that Turner Syndrome girls with an intact paternal X gene, the one inherited from the father, managed far better socially than those with the maternal X functioning. Something about picking up social cues was coded for genetically, and on the paternal X.