Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Where else did social facility reside in the genome? What cues of body language, facial expression, or tone of voice was Cosette picking up? Somehow the dog knew that when Hughes and Arlen set the chessmen in place, this wasn’t the start of a new game. Something, dictated at least in part by Cosette’s genes, was causing processes in her poodle brain. After all, Hughes’s dog, a big dumb Samoyed, never seemed to anticipate anything. Snowy was continually surprised by gravity. Arlen found the genes in dogs. It took him ten years, during which he failed to get tenure because he wouldn’t publish. After Stanford let him go, he still didn’t publish. He found the genes in humans. He still didn’t publish. Stone broke, he was well on the way to bitter and yet with his idealism undimmed—an odd combination, but not unknown among science fanatics. Inevitably, he crossed paths with people even more fanatical. Kenneth Bernard Arlen joined forces with off-shore backers to open a fertility clinic that created super-empathic children.

  Empathy turns up early in some children. A naturally empathic nine-month-old will give her teddy bear to another child who is crying; the toddler senses how bad the other child feels. People who score high in perceiving others’ emotions are more popular, more outgoing, better adjusted, more happily married, more successful at their jobs. Arlen’s Syndrome toddlers understood—not verbally, but in their limbic systems—when Mommy was worried, when Daddy wanted them to go potty, that Grandma loved them, that a stranger was dangerous.

  If his first illegal, off-shore experiments with human germ lines had resulted in deformities, Arlen would have been crucified. There were no deformities. Prospective clients loved the promise of kids who actually understood how parents felt. By six or seven, Arlen’s Syndrome kids could, especially if they were bright, read an astonishing array of non-verbal signals. By nine or ten, it was impossible to lie to them. As long as you were honest and genuinely had their best interests in mind, the children were a joy to live with: sensitive, cooperative, grateful, aware.

  And yet here was Belinda Barrington, staring at me from her pale eyes, and I didn’t need a genetic dose of super-empathy to see her glee at embarrassing me. I couldn’t look at Jane. The blood was hot in my face.

  Frieda said, sharply and hopelessly, “Belinda, that’s not nice.”

  “No, it’s not,” Bridget said. She frowned at her sister, and Belinda actually looked away for a moment. Her twin had some childish control over Belinda, and her mother didn’t. “Tell him you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Belinda muttered, unconvincingly. So they could lie, if not be lied to. Frieda said to Jane, “This is new behavior. I’m sure it’s just a phase. Nothing you’d want to include in your project!”

  Belinda shot her mother a look of freezing contempt.

  Jane took control of the sorry situation. Sparing me any direct glance, she said to Belinda, “Did anybody tell you why I want to talk to you girls?”

  “No,” Belinda said. “You’re not a reporter.”

  “I’m a movie actress.”

  Bridget brightened. “Like Kylie Kicker?” Apparently Arlen’s Advantage did not confer immunity to inane kiddie pop culture.

  “Not as young,” Jane smiled, “or as rich. But I’m making a movie about the lives that girls like you might have when you’re grown up. That’s why I want to get to know you a little bit now. But only if it’s okay with you.”

  The twins looked at each other. Neither spoke, but I had the impression that gigabytes passed between them. Frieda said, “Girls, I hope you’ll cooperate with Miss Snow. She—”

  “No, you don’t,” Belinda said, almost absently. “You don’t like her. She’s too pretty. But we like her.” Frieda’s face went a mottled maroon. Bridget, her plump features alarmed, put a hand on her mother’s arm. But Frieda shook it off, started to say something, then abruptly stood and stalked into the house. Bridget made a move to follow but checked herself. To me—why?—she said apologetically, “She wants to be alone a little while.”

  “You should go with her,” Belinda said, and I didn’t have to be told twice. These kids gave me the creeps.

  Not that even they, with their overpraised empathy, could ever understand why. In the foyer, Suky still lay on the chaise longue with her comic book. There was no sign of her mother. The other chairs were all mammoth leather things, but a low antique bench stood against one wall and I clambered painfully onto it and called a cab. I would have to walk all the way to the front gate to meet it, but the thought of going back in the flyer with Jane was unbearable. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. My back and legs ached, but nothing compared to my heart. It wasn’t the words Belinda had said. Yes, I loved Jane and yes, that love was hopeless. I already knew that and so must Jane. How could she not? I was with her nearly every day; she was a woman sensitive to nuance. I knew she hated my accidental touch, and hated herself for that, and could help none of it. Three of Jane’s husbands had been among the best-looking men on the planet. Tall, strong, straight-limbed. I had seen Jane’s flesh glow rosy just because James or Karl or Duncan was in the same room with her. I had felt her hide her recoil from me.

  “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” How often as a child had I chanted that to myself after another in the endless string of bullies had taunted me? Short Stuff, Dopey, Munchkin, Big Butt, Mighty Midget, Oompa Loompa, cripple . . . Belinda hadn’t illuminated any new truth for anybody. What she had done was speak it aloud.

  “Give sorrow words”—but even Shakespeare could be as wrong as nursery chants. Something unnamed could, just barely, be ignored. Could be kept out of daily interaction, could almost be pretended away. What had been “given words” could not. And now tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, Jane and I would have to try to work together, would avoid each other’s eyes, would each tread the dreary internal treadmill: Is he/she upset? Did I brush too close, stay too far away, give off any hurtful signal . . . For God’s sake, leave me alone!

  Speech doesn’t banish distance; it creates it. And if—

  “Bitches, aren’t they?” a voice said softly. I opened my eyes. Suky stood close to my bench. She was taller than I’d thought, with a spectacular figure. No one would ever notice, not next to the wonder and novelty of the twins.

  In my shamed confusion, I blurted out the first thing that came into my mind. “Belinda is, Bridget isn’t.”

  “That’s what you think.” Suky laughed, then laid her comic book on the bench. “You need this, dwarf.”

  She vanished into some inner corridor.

  I picked up the comic. It was holo, those not-inexpensive e-graphics with chips embedded in the paper. Four panels succeeded each other on each page, with every panel dramatizing the plot in ten-second bursts of shifting light. The title was “Knife Hack,” and the story seemed to concern a mother who carves up her infants with a maximum amount of blood and brain spatter.

  Arlen’s Syndrome kids: a joy to live with, sensitive and cooperative and grateful and aware.

  Just one big happy family.

  But sometimes the universe gives you a break. The next day I had a cold. Nothing serious, just a stuffy nose and sore throat, but I sounded like a rusty file scraping on cast iron, so I called in sick to my “office” at Jane’s estate. Her trainer answered. “What?”

  “Tell Jane I won’t be in today. Sick. And remind her to—”

  “I’m not your errand boy, Barry,” he answered hotly. We stared at each other’s comlink images in mutual dislike. Dino Carrano was the trainer-to-the-stars-of-the-moment-before-this-one, an arrogant narcissist who three times a week tortured Jane into perfect abs and weeping exhaustion. Like Ishmael, he was without the prescience to realize that his brief vogue had passed and that Jane kept him on partly from compassion. He stood now in her deserted exercise room.

  “Why are you answering the phone? Where’s Catalina?”

  “Her grandmother in Mexico died. Again. And before you ask, José is supervising the grounds
crew and Jane is in the bathroom, throwing up. Now you know everything. Bye, Barry.”

  “Wait! If she’s throwing up because you pushed her too hard again, you Dago bastard—”

  “Save your invective, little man. We haven’t even started the training session yet, and if we don’t train by tomorrow, her ass is going to drop like a duffel bag. For today she just ate something bad.” He cut the link.

  My stomach didn’t feel too steady, either. Had it been the Barrington lemonade? I made it to the bathroom just in time. But afterward I felt better, decided not to call my doctor, and went to bed. If Jane was sick, Catalina would cancel her appointments. No, Catalina was in Mexico . . . not my problem. But all Jane’s problems were mine. Without her, I had my own problems—Leila, Ethan—but no actual life.

  Nonetheless, I forced myself to stay in bed, and eventually I fell asleep. When I woke, six hours later, my throat and stomach both felt fine. A quick call discovered that Catalina had returned from Mexico, sounding suspiciously unbereaved. But she was efficient enough when she was actually in the country, and I decided I didn’t need to brief Jane on tomorrow’s schedule. That would buy me one more day. I would take a relaxing evening. A long bath, a glass of wine, another postponement of talking to Leila. The industry news on Hollywood Watch.

  The local news came on first. Ishmael’s body had been found in a pond in the Valley.

  “. . . and weighted with cement blocks. Cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, execution style,” said the news avatar, a CGI who looked completely real except that she had no faulty camera angles whatsoever. I stared at the photo of Ishmael’s handsome face on the screen beside her.

  “Apparently the murderers were unaware that construction work would start today at the pond site, where luxury condos will be built by—”

  Ishmael’s name was Harold Sylvester Ehrenreich. Failed actor, minor grifter, petty tax evader, who had dropped out of electronic sight eight months ago.

  “Anyone having any information concerning—”

  I was already on the comlink. “Jane?”

  “I just called the cops. They’re on their way over.” She looked tired, drawn, within five years of her actual age. Her voice sounded as raspy as mine had been. “I was just about to call you. Barry, if this endangers the picture—”

  “It won’t,” I said. Thirty years a star, and she still didn’t understand how the behind-the-scenes worked.

  “It will make the picture. Did you call Everett?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “Don’t say a word until both he and I get there. Not a word, Jane, not one. Can you send the flyer for me?”

  “Yes. Barry—was he killed because of my interview?”

  “There’s no way to know that,” I said, and all at once was profoundly grateful that it was true. I didn’t care if Ishmael was alive, dead, or fucking himself on Mars, but Jane was built differently. People mattered to her, especially the wounded-bird type. It was how she’d ended up married to three of her four husbands and the fourth, the Alpha-Male Producer, had been in reaction to the second, the alcoholic failed actor. Catalina, Jane’s housekeeper and social secretary, was another of her wounded birds. So, in his own perverse way, was her trainer.

  Maybe that was why Jane had ended up with me as well.

  But I could tell that neither me nor Belinda’s cruel words were on Jane’s mind just now. It was all Ishmael, and that was good. Ishmael would get us safely past our personal crisis. Even murder has its silver lining.

  As the flyer set down on Jane’s roof, I saw the media already starting to converge. Someone must have tipped them off, perhaps a clerk at the precinct. An unmarked car was parked within Jane’s gates, with two vans outside and another flyer approaching from LA. Catalina let me in, her dark eyes wide with excitement. “La policia—”

  “I know. Is Everett Murphy here?”

  “Yes, he—”

  “Bring in coffee and cake. And make the maids draw all the curtains in the house, immediately. Even the bedrooms. There’ll be robocams.” I wanted pictures and information released on my schedule, not that of flying recorders.

  A man and a woman sat with Jane and Everett at one end of her enormous living room, which the decorator had done in swooping black curves with accents of screaming purple. The room looked nothing like Jane, who used it only for parties. She’d actually defied the decorator, who was a Dino-Carrano-bully type but not a wounded bird, and done her private sitting room in English country house. But she hadn’t taken the detectives there. I could guess why: she was protecting her safe haven. Catalina rushed past me like a small Mexican tornado and dramatically pushed the button to opaque the windows. They went deep purple, and lights flickered on in the room. Catalina raced out.

  “Barry,” Jane said. She looked even worse than on comlink, red nose and swollen eyes and no make-up. I hoped to hell that neither cop was optic wired. “This is Detective Lopez and Detective Miller from the LAPD. Officers, my manager Barry Tenler.”

  They nodded. Both were too well-trained to show curiosity or distaste, but they were there. I always know. In her sitting room Jane kept a low chair for me, but here I had to scramble up onto a high black sofa that satisfied the decorator desire for “an important piece.” I said, “You can question Miss Snow now, but please be advised that she has already spoken with the FBI and HPA, and that both Mr. Murphy and I reserve the right to advise her not to answer.”

  The cops ignored this meaningless window dressing. But I’d accomplished what I wanted. Dwarfs learn early that straightforward, multisyllabic, take-no-shit talk will sometimes stop average-sizers from treating us like children. Sometimes.

  Officer Lopez began a thorough interrogation: How had she arranged the meeting with the Group?

  When? What contact had she had between the initial one and the meeting? Who had taken her to the meeting? Who else had accompanied her? When they found out that it had been me, Lopez got the look of a man who knows he’s screwed up. “You were there, Mr. Tenler?”

  “I was.”

  “You’ll have to go with Officer Miller into another room,” Lopez said. He stared at me hard. Witnesses were always questioned separately, and even if it hadn’t crossed his mind that someone like me was a witness, he suspected it had crossed mine. Which it had. If law-enforcement agencies weren’t given to so many turf wars, the LAPD would already know I’d been in that grimy basement. Or if Lopez hadn’t fallen victim to his own macho assumptions. You? She took a lame half-pint like you to protect her?

  “Everett is my lawyer, too,” I said.

  “You go with Officer Miller. Mr. Murphy will join you when I’m finished with Miss Snow.” Lopez’s formality barely restrained his anger.

  Following Officer Miller to the media room, it occurred to me—pointlessly—that Belinda would have known immediately that I’d been withholding something.

  It seemed obvious to me, as it probably was to the cops, that Ishmael had been killed by the Group. Narcissistic, bombastic, unreliable, he must have screwed up royally. Was Ms. Resentful dead, too? The bodyguard with the assault rifle? The boy who’d guided us through the warehouse?

  The Group was trying to combine idealism, profit-making, and iron control. That combination never worked. I would say that to Officer Lopez, except that there was little chance he would take it seriously. Not from me.

  The media spent a breathless three or four days on the story (“Famous Actress Questioned About Genemod Murder! What Does Jane Know?”). Then a United States senator married a former porn star named Candy Alley and the press moved on, partly because it was clear that Jane didn’t know anything. I’d positioned her as cooperative, concerned, committed to her art, and bewildered by the killing. Opinion polls said the public viewed her favorably. She increased her name recognition 600 percent among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, most of whom watched only holos and had never seen a Jane Snow picture. Publicity is publicity.

  She got
even more of it by spending so much time with the Barrington twins. Everybody liked this except me. Frieda liked the press attention (at least, such press as wasn’t staking out the senator and his new pork barrel). The twins liked Jane. She liked caring for yet more wounded birds, which was what she considered them. Her thinking on this escaped me; these were two of the most pampered children in the known universe. But Jane was only filling time, anyway, until the script was finished. And to her credit, she turned down the party invitations from the I’m-more-important-than-you A-list crowd that had ignored her for a decade. I’d urged her to turn down social invitations in order to create that important aura of non-attainable exclusivity. Jane turned them down because she no longer considered those people to be friends.

  As for me, I worked at home on the hundreds of pre-photography details. Before I could finally reach Leila, she called me.

  “Hey, Barry.”

  “Hey, Leila.” She didn’t look good. I steeled myself to ask. “How is he?”

  “Gone again.” Exhaustion pulled at her face. “I called the LAPD but they won’t do anything.”

  “He’ll come home,” I said. “He always does.”

  “Yeah, and one of these days it’ll be in a coffin.”

  I said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say.

  Leila, however, could always find something. “Well, if he does come home in a coffin, then you’ll be off the hook, won’t you? No more risk of embarrassing you or the gorgeous has-been.”

  “Leila—”

  “Have a good time with your big shot Hollywood friends. I’ll just wait to hear if this time the son you deformed really is dead.”