Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  She hung up on me.

  Leila and I met at a Little People of America convention in Denver. She was one of the teenage dwarfs dancing joyously, midriff bared and short skirt flipping, at the annual ball. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: red hair and blue eyes, alive to her fingertips. I was eighteen years older than she, and everyone at the convention knew who I was. High-ranking aide to a candidate for the mayor of San Francisco. Smart, successful, sharply dressed. Local dwarf makes good. More mobile then, I asked her to dance. Six months later we married. Six months after that, while I was running the campaign for a gubernatorial candidate, Leila accidentally got pregnant.

  Two dwarfs have a 25 percent chance of conceiving an average-sized child, a 50 percent chance of a dwarf, and a 25 percent of a double-dominant, which always dies shortly after birth. Leila and I had never discussed these odds because, like most dwarfs, we planned on the in vitro fertilization that permits cherry-picking embryos. But Leila got careless with her pills. She knew immediately that she was pregnant, and even before the zygote had implanted itself in her uterus wall, testing showed that the fetus had a “normal” FGFR3 gene. I panicked.

  “I don’t want to have an average-sized kid,” I told Leila. “I just don’t.”

  “And I don’t want to have an abortion,” Leila said. “It’s not that I’m politically opposed to abortion. I’m glad to have the choice, but . . . Barry, I . . . I just can’t. He’s already a baby to me. Our baby. Why would having an Average be so hard?”

  “Why?” I’d waved a hand around our house, in which everything—furniture, appliance controls, doorknobs—had been built to our scale. “Just look around! Besides, there’s a moral question here, Leila. You know that with in vitro, fewer and fewer dwarfs are having dwarf children. That just reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with being a dwarf. I don’t want to perpetuate that—I won’t perpetuate that. This is a political issue! I want a dwarf child.” She believed me. She was twenty to my thirty-nine, and I was a big-shot politico. She loved me. Leila lacked the perspicacity to see how terrified I was of an average-sized son, who would be as tall as I was by the time he was seven. Who would be impossible to control. Who might eventually despise me and his mother both. But Leila really, really didn’t want to abort. I talked her into in utero somatic gene therapy in England.

  In those days I believed in science. The soma-gene technique was new but producing spectacular results. The British had gotten behind genetic engineering in a big way, and knowledgeable people from all over the world flocked to Cambridge, where private firms tied to the great university were turning genes on and off in fetuses still in the womb. This had to be done during the first week or ten days after conception. The FGFR3 gene stops bones from growing. It was turned on in babies with dwarfism; a corrective genemod retrovirus should be able to turn the gene off in the little mass of cells that was Ethan. The problem was that the Cambridge biotech clinic wouldn’t do it.

  “We cure disease, not cause it,” I was told icily.

  “Dwarfism is not a disease!” I said, too angry to be icy. Waving high the banner of political righteousness. It wasn’t a good idea, in those days, to cross me. I was the high-ranking, infallible campaign guru, the tiny wunderkind, the man who was never wrong. Fear can present itself as arrogance.

  “Nonetheless,” the scientist told me in that aloof British accent, “we will not do it. Nor, I suspect, will any clinic in the United Kingdom.”

  He was right. Time was running out. The next day we went off-shore, to a clinic in the Caymans, and something went wrong. The retrovirus that was the delivery vector mutated, or the splicing caused other genes to jump (they will do that), or maybe God just wanted an evil joke that day. The soma-gene correction spawned side effects, with one gene turning on another that in turn affected another, a cascade of creation run amok. And we got Ethan.

  Leila never forgave me, and I never forgave myself. She left me when Ethan was not quite two. I sent money. I tried to stay in touch. I bore Leila’s fury and contempt and despair. She sent me pictures of Ethan, but she wouldn’t let me see him. I could have pressed visitation through the courts. I didn’t. My gubernatorial candidate lost.

  “Barry,” Jane comlinked me the night before the first script conference, “would you like to come to dinner tonight?”

  “Can’t,” I lied. “I already have dinner plans.”

  “Oh? With whom?”

  “A friend.” I smiled mysteriously. Some inane, back-in-high-school part of my brain hoped that she’d think I had a date. Then I saw Bridget Barrington scamper across the room behind Jane. “Are those kids at your place?”

  “Yes, I couldn’t go there today because Catalina is sick and I had to—”

  “Sick? With what? Jane, you can’t catch anything now, the first reading is tomorrow and—”

  “I won’t catch this—I gave it to her. It’s that sore-throat-and-stomach thing we both had. Catalina—”

  “You’re not a goddamn nurse! If Catalina is ill—” give me credit, I didn’t say actually ill instead of faking the way she fakes relatives’ deaths every fifteen minutes“—then hire a nurse or—”

  “She’s not sick enough for a nurse, she just needs coddling and orange juice and company. It’s fine, Barry, so butt out. I’m actually glad of the distraction, it keeps me from thinking about tonight. Oh, I meant to tell you—I talked Robert into couriering the script to me! I wanted to read it before tomorrow. He sounded weird about it, but he agreed.”

  My radar turned on. “Weird how?”

  “I don’t know. Just weird.”

  I considered all the possible “weirds” that the producer could be conveying, but I didn’t see what I could do about any of them. I settled for, “Just don’t catch anything from Catalina.”

  “I already told you that I won’t.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say.”

  And it was fine. She was treating me the way she always did, with exasperated affection, and I was grateful. Belinda’s poison, flushed out of our working relationship by the flood of feeling about Ishmael’s murder, hadn’t harmed us. I wouldn’t lose the little of Jane that I had. And the picture was going to be a blockbuster.

  “It’s a disaster!” Jane screamed. “I won’t do it!”

  Sitting up in bed, I stared blearily at the wall screen. Beneath the image of Jane’s ravaged face, the time said 12:56 AM. I struggled to assemble consciousness.

  “What is—”

  She started to cry, great gasping sobs that would wreck her face for tomorrow’s conference. When had I seen Jane cry like that? When the last husband left. And the one before that.

  “I’m coming right over,” I said. “I’m leaving immediately. Don’t read any more of the script. We’ll work this out, I promise.”

  She was sobbing too hard to answer me.

  “Just have a glass of wine and wait for me.”

  “O. . . okay.”

  I cut the link and called my chauffeur. I can drive if I have to, but it’s painful. Ernie and his wife Sandra, my housekeeper, live in the guest cottage. They’re both achons. “Mr. Tenler? What is it? Are you okay?” Ernie sounded bewildered. They’re good people, but I’ve kept our relationship distant, not given to midnight calls for chauffeur service.

  “I’m fine, but I have to go to Miss Snow’s immediately. Can you bring around the car in five minutes?”

  “Five minutes?” Ernie’s face looked exhausted. “Yeah, sure.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Surprise replaced his exhaustion. I wasn’t in the habit of asking after Ernie’s health.

  “Yeah, I’m fine, it’s just that Sandra and I have both been under the weather. But no big deal. I’ll be there in—”

  “But if you’re sick, maybe you shouldn’t—”

  “Five minutes,” Ernie said, and now suspicion had replaced surprise. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t know, either. Painfully I climbed from the bed
, tried to flex my aching body, and pulled on clothes. I hobbled out the front door as the Lexus pulled up.

  “Here,” I said, handing Ernie a pain patch and a plastiflask of orange juice. He stared at me and shook his head.

  Jane, in robe and slippers, let me in herself. Her face, red and blotchy and swollen, looked the worst I’d ever seen it. I wanted to take her in my arms, and that turned my voice harsher than I expected. “What’s wrong with the fucking script?”

  Perversely, my anger seemed to steady her. “It’s a travesty.”

  “Did they reduce your part?”

  “That’s the least of it! Read it, Barry. I want you to read it for yourself.” She led the way to her sitting room. A bottle of wine, half empty, sat on the table. Jane poured herself a third glass as I read, but I wasn’t worried about that. Despite her fragile looks, Jane could out-drink a Russian stevedore. I began to read.

  Future Perfect was based on a short story by an obscure writer, which means the studio got the rights cheap. Like much fiction set in the future, it extrapolated from the present, portraying a Mississippi city in which the mayor was an Arlen’s Syndrome young woman named Kate Bradshaw. Kate, empathetic but inexperienced, was guided by Jane’s character, an ex-DA who was tough, funny, and not above using her mature sexuality for political ends. The story arc brought in prejudice, female friendship, and the choices that politics must make to accommodate radically different points of view. There was a lot of lush Deep South atmosphere. The ending, deliberately ambiguous, featured a knock-out closing speech for Jane’s DA.

  The script had moved the story to LA. The mayor was an evil Delilah who could read minds. She seduced and destroyed men, subverted democracy, had her enemies tortured. Clones were created. Buildings blew up, many buildings. Jane’s character was also blown up, a third of the way into the movie. The mayor is eventually shot through the heart by a noble young HPA agent. The body bleeds viscous yellow blood.

  “Jane,” I said, and stopped. I had to be careful, had to choose just the right words. She had finished off the bottle of wine. I brought her a box of tissues, even though she had stopped crying. “I know it’s bad, but—”

  “I won’t do it.” Her flexible voice held the kind of despair that’s gone past raging, gone straight into hopelessness.

  “This is only the first pass at the script. We can ask for—”

  “You know we won’t get it.”

  I did know. I went to the main point. “Janie, sweetheart, this is the only project you’ve been offered in—”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “Jane, you’re not—”

  “I should think you would understand,” she said, looking at me directly with a very un-Jane look. No softness, no flirtation, nothing but quiet, unvarnished truth. “This piece of shit encourages hatred. Not just portrays it, but actively encourages it. Arlen’s kids are different, therefore they must be bad, evil. More than that—they’re the result of a genetic difference, so they must be really bad, really evil, and we should clean them out of our society. I should think you, of all people, Barry, would object to that.” We had never, not once in five years, discussed my dwarfism. She didn’t know about Leila, about Ethan. This was uncharted territory for us, and with every cell of my being I did not want to go there. She had no right to bring this home to me; it was her decision. Anger hijacked my brain.

  “You have no idea what I should or should not object to! Do you think that two weeks spent with a few genetically privileged kids gives you insight into what genetics can do? You know nothing, you’re as ignorant and stupid as most of the rest of the so-called ‘normal’ population. You have no idea the anguish that fucking genemods can cause, you think they’re all uplifting improvements to mankind, you think that you can just . . . Go ahead, commit career suicide! This script is all you’ve been offered in three years, and it’s all you’re going to get offered. You’re an aging actress who belongs to another era, a Norma Desmond who will never . . . go ahead, tell yourself you’re taking the moral high ground! You’re standing on quicksand, and I’ll be fucked if I let you take me down with you!” Silence.

  She said wearily, “I won’t do this script.”

  “Fine. Get yourself another manager.”

  I hobbled out to the waiting car and Ernie drove me home.

  Jane withdrew from the picture. The studio cast Suri Cruise in the part; she was young enough to be Jane’s daughter. Leila called to say tersely that Ethan had crawled home from his latest bout of homelessness. He had a broken nose, a black eye, and a mangled hand. She wouldn’t let me come to see him: “How would he even know who the fuck you are?” I didn’t insist. The LAPD announced periodically that there were no new developments in the Harold Ehrenreich murder case, and over the next few months, Ishmael’s handsome face disappeared from the newsgrids. Ernie recovered from his bout of flu in a few days, but Sandra’s turned into pneumonia and she had to go to the hospital. I visited her every day, to her bewilderment. This was new behavior, but I knew the cause. I had nothing else to do, or at least nothing I could make myself do, and hospital visiting was a distraction. Sandra was only there for four days, but her roommate developed complications and had to go into ICU. She was a frightened old woman with no family. I brought her flowers and chocolate and, when she was a little better, played mah-jongg with her. The game attracted a few other invalids, including a young man dying of one of the few cancers that medicine still couldn’t cure. I began visiting him, too. Martin never seemed to even notice that I was a dwarf. Perhaps, as someone once remarked, dying does concentrate the mind, squeezing out everything else.

  Every once in a while I reflected wryly that I seemed to have taken on Jane’s penchant for wounded birds. But I didn’t reflect too hard; hospital visiting was a long way from Hollywood management, which in turn was a long way from the nails-tough political world. I didn’t want to look at how far I’d fallen. Jane, too, seemed to be in wounded-bird mode. Sometimes, not too often, a picture of her would turn up on some fourth-rate “celebrity watch” linksite, the holo supplied by a desperate paparazzo who couldn’t do better. In those shots, she was helping some homeless drunk or paying the bills for a child who owned one ragged dress, or so it was claimed. The holos of Jane with the Barrington twins, on the other hand, turned up regularly on all the news vectors. Frieda Barrington probably saw to that. In July, Ernie and Sandra quit. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tenler, but we’re not comfortable here any more.”

  “Not comfortable?” I had just spent twenty thousand dollars remodeling the guest cottage.

  “No.” He shifted from one foot to the other. Ernie has a smaller head and butt than a lot of achons, but he’s far from being a proportional, and another job that paid this well for this little work was not going to be easy to find. Not for him, not for Sandra. Where would they go?

  “Where will you go?”

  “That’s our business.”

  It was such a rude answer that I frowned. Something in the frown broke his reserve.

  “Look, Mr. Tenler, it’s not that we aren’t grateful. You done a lot for us. But lately you’re so . . . we didn’t want the cottage remodeled, and I said as much to you. You keep giving us things we don’t want. And . . . and hanging around a lot. I’m sorry, but it’s a huge pain in the ass.” And I had just wanted to help!

  But now Ernie was wound up. “It’s like you’re trying to control us. I know, I know, you think you’re being a good guy, but we . . . and those calls! They’re creeping out Sandra. It’s best that we go.” I gave them a generous severance pay-out and hired a Mexican couple, undocumented, who desperately needed jobs. It felt good to help them along. The comlink calls, I started taking myself. They came once or twice a week. No visual, and the audio came through a voice changer. Routing was via a private, encrypted satellite system, so there was no chance whatsoever of tracing the calls. I thought at first that they might be from Jane, but this emphatically was not her style. Each call was exactly the same:r />
  “Barry Tenler.”

  “I’m Barry Tenler.”

  Heavy breathing. Finally, “I know how you feel.”

  “Feel about what?”

  And now the mechanical voice—this isn’t supposed to be possible, but I swear I heard it—hinted at pain. “I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position.”

  “Look, let me help—” And the link ended.

  What “position” ? Another dwarf? Another unemployed PR-flack-cum-manager? Another parent of a kid with major genetic problems?

  Then I had another mystery because the feds showed up. They proved to be just as elusive as my unknown caller.

  “We’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Tenler.”

  “What about? Do I need my lawyer?”

  “No, not at all. These are just general questions, in the public interest. You’d really help us out.” I blinked. The HPA usually commands “help” rather than requests it, and these were not the erection-jawed types who’d interviewed me after Jane’s and my visit to the Group. These two, a man and a woman, were both short, slightly built, mild in manner, deliberately unthreatening. Why? I was curious. Also bored, so I asked them in. Or maybe it was just to see them both perch uncomfortably on my dwarf-sized living room chairs, their knees rising above the cocktail table like cliff faces from a Himalayan valley.

  “Have you been ill lately, Mr. Tenler?”

  “Ill? No. I’m fine.” I knew they weren’t referring to chronic pain. Nor to chronic self-pity, either.

  “No flu-like symptoms?”

  “I did have the flu a few months ago, but nothing since.”

  I could sense the two of them not looking at each other.

  “What is this about?” I asked. “I think I’d like to know before I answer any more questions.”

  “I wish we could accommodate you, sir,” the woman said apologetically. She was maybe five-one, pretty, and when she smiled at me, I felt anger swell in my chest. A cheap tactic if there ever was one. Maybe he’ll talk to a woman on his own level . . . “Just one more question, please. It would really help us out. Since March, has anyone from the Group tried to contact you?”