Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “No.” If the encrypted calls were from the Group, I didn’t know it, and the feds weren’t going to, either.

  “Thank you, Mr. Tenler,” she said winningly, and handed me her card. Agent Elaine Brown, Human Protection Agency.

  “Once again, what is this about?”

  “Please contact us if anything occurs to you, or if you’re contacted by the Group,” the male agent said.

  “There’s been chatter among our informants.”

  I knew better than to ask what kind of chatter; he’d probably said too much anyway. After they left, I stared at Elaine Brown’s card, wondering what the hell that had all been about.

  Two weeks later, I found out. The whole world found out, but I was first. Another post-midnight phone call, and this time I was not in the mood for it. I’d spent the day at the hospital. Martin, my mah-jongg playing cancer patient, died at 4:43 PM. The only other person there was his elderly mother, who then fell apart. I had done for her what I could, which wasn’t much, arriving home late at night. Three whisky-and-sodas hadn’t dulled my sense that the world made no sense. The bedside clock said 2:14 AM. I snarled at the screen, “What?”

  “Barry Tenler.” It wasn’t a question. The screen stayed dark.

  “Look, I’m not in the mood for games tonight, so you can just—” Then it hit me that the voice was not mechanical, not masked. A woman’s voice, and somewhere I’d heard it before.

  “Listen to me, this is a matter of life and death for someone you love. Get Jane Snow away to someplace safe and hidden, and do it now. Tonight.”

  “What the—who are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter who I am. Get her away tonight.”

  “Why? What’s going to—no, don’t hang up! You’re—”

  Where had I heard that voice?

  “Just go. Good-bye.”

  I had it. “You’re the woman from the Group.” In the warehouse basement. To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen. The only sentence I’d heard her utter, and not even a whole sentence. A fragment. Silence.

  “And,” I said, as it all came together in my sleep-deprived brain, “you’re the woman who’s been making those masked calls to me.” I know how you feel . . . I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position. “You loved Ishmael.”

  “They murdered him!” A second later she’d regained control of herself. That a woman like this lost control at all was a measure of her pain. Grief can drive even the toughest person to acts of insanity. Maybe especially the toughest person. She said, “I underestimated you.”

  I didn’t say People usually do, because now fear had my chest gripped tight. She was credible, at least to me. “How is Jane in danger? Please tell me.”

  A long pause, and then she said, “Why the fuck not? But know one thing, Barry Tenler. You will never find me, and neither will the Group. And tomorrow morning it will all be public anyway. Tell me, have you ever heard of oxytorin?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get ill a few days after your little visit in March to that warehouse?” The fear gripped harder. “Flu-like symp—”

  “It wasn’t flu. Tell me, have you noticed yourself engaged in unusual behaviors lately? Has Jane? Has anyone else with whom you’ve exchanged bodily fluids, especially saliva?” I hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids, including saliva, with anyone. But all at once I remembered the pre-meeting searches in the warehouse. A man had checked me over, including opening my mouth and moving aside my tongue. His hands had felt unpleasantly slimy.

  I was having trouble breathing. “What . . . what is oxytorin?”

  “Nothing that will kill you. The Group is made up of idealists, remember? Idealists who murder anyone who wanders two inches off the reservation.” She laughed, a horrible sound. “I know he was dumb and vain, but I loved him. Sneer at that if you will, only you won’t, will you? Not you. You’re just as enslaved by another beautiful moron. And you can’t help it any more than I could, can you?”

  “Please . . . what is oxytorin?”

  Her tone lost its anguished cynicism. Relaying factual information steadied her.

  “It’s a neuropeptide, a close relative to oxytocin, secreted in the brain and the pituitary gland. Like oxytocin, it has effects on social behavior. Specifically, it promotes nurturing behavior. If you give it to virgin female rats, within forty-eight hours they’re building nests and trying to nurse any baby rats you hand to them. If you remove it from mother rats’ brains, they ignore their babies and let them die. The same with monkeys. It—”

  Nurturing behavior. Bringing Ernie and Sandra orange juice and remodeling their cottage. Visiting hospital patients whom I met by accident. Jane, childless, spending hours and hours with the Barrington twins.

  “—has been synthesized synthetically for a long time, but the synthetic version has to be injected directly into the brain. That’s not practical when you want to permanently influence a large fraction of the population, so instead—”

  “You bastards.” It came out a whisper, strangled by rage.

  “—the Group went with a compound that switches on the genes that create oxytorin receptors. You don’t have more oxytorin, you just have more receptors for it, so more of it is actually affecting your brain. Although susceptibility to the genemod will vary among people—like, say, susceptibility to cholera depends on blood type. The delivery vector is a retrovirus, capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier, but which first colonizes mouth and nose secretions. The—”

  “You used us. Me and Jane. You—”

  “—desired end here is a kinder, gentler populace. Isn’t that what we all want?” The combination of cynicism and idealism in her words stunned me, because I knew it was absolutely genuine. Again, a whisper: “You can’t.”

  “We did. And if the fucking leadership had ever taken it themselves, before they decided Harold was a liability—” She was sobbing. I didn’t care.

  My throat opened up. I screamed, “You can’t just fuck around with people’s genes without their consent!”

  The sobbing stopped. She said coldly, “Why not? You did.”

  She knew. They knew. About Ethan.

  “I’m telling you this because tomorrow morning the Group is putting the story on the Link. You and your ageing Aphrodite are carriers, and when the press gets hold of that, you’ll be inundated, if not lynched. Especially since the Group is saying that Jane Snow cooperated, that this is part of her Hollywood liberal-left politics. Plenty will believe it. And even if they don’t, sensationalism always works best when pegged to a few identifiable people. You should know that.”

  “Why are you telling—”

  “You don’t listen, do you? I already told you why. You’re just as fucked as I am. We’re alike, you and I, and neither of us ever stood a fucking chance of getting who we wanted. Damn them to hell, all of them . . . It always comes down to bodies, Munchkin, and yours has been damned twice. So get yourself and her out of town. Now.” The link broke.

  I stood staring at nothing for a full minute, for a lifetime. I wasn’t even aware of the body she had just mocked. Only my mind raced.

  Bodily fluids. Blood, semen, saliva. Jane wiping snot from the noses of the Barrington twins, kissing them, kissing half of the Hollywood press corps in their touch-touch social rituals. And . . . sleeping with someone? I never asked her. And undoubtedly we weren’t the only two that had been infected; that wouldn’t be widespread enough. We were just the two that were going to be publicly named. The weakness of the Group’s expensive, individually created genemods for Arlen’s Syndrome had always been the very small number of empathic kids it could create. When Jane had pointed this out, Ishmael had gone into his grandiose “ripple” analogy, which explained nothing. But somewhere above Ishmael were people far more knowledgeable, more committed, more dangerous. People with a plan, a revolution for society. The Group had been waging war with the genomes of children as bullets. Now they had moved up to soma-gene enginee
ring, as saturation bombing.

  Anger is a great heartener. I dressed quickly, put a few things in a bag, and went down to the car. The kind of encryption that my caller had used was not available to me, and so the comlink was too big a risk. The pedal extenders that Ernie had used in the Lexus, and which Carlos didn’t need, were still in the trunk. I installed them and drove to Jane’s. I have e-codes to the gate and the house. Within an hour I was at her bedroom door.

  What if she wasn’t alone?

  Deep breath. I went in. “Jane? Don’t scream, it’s Barry.”

  “What—”

  “It’s Barry. I’m turning on the light.”

  She sat up in bed, wild-eyed, and she wasn’t alone. The Barrington twins curled up on the other side of the huge bed, lost in the heavy sleep of childhood, their hair in tangles and drool on their pillows. “What the fuck—”

  All at once my legs gave way. I grasped the edge of the mattress, lowered myself to the floor, and so once again had to look up at her. “Listen, Janie, this is life-and-death. We have to leave here. Now. No, don’t say anything—just listen to me for once!”

  Something in my voice, or my ridiculous position, got through to her. She didn’t say a word as I told her everything that I’d been told. Her feathery light hair drifted in some air current from the open window, and above the modest blue pajamas she wore for this grandmotherly sleep-over, her neck and face turned mottled red, and then dead white. When I finished, I heaved myself to my feet.

  “Pack a bag. Five minutes.”

  And then she spoke. “I can’t leave the twins.”

  I stared at her.

  “I can’t, Barry. Frieda and John are in Europe, so the are kids staying with me this week, and anyway won’t they be in danger, too? I must have infected them by now . . . saliva . . .”

  “Catalina will look after them!”

  “She’s in Mexico. Her aunt died.”

  I closed my eyes. I knew that look of Jane’s. “No,” I said.

  “I have to! And Frieda would want me to—God, they already get death threats every day! When it’s public that they can infect others—”

  Nurturing behavior. Virgin rats trying to nurse any baby rats you hand to them. I said, “It’s kidnapping.”

  “It’s not. I’ll email Frieda.”

  One of the girls woke up. She gazed at us from wide, frightened eyes. It was Bridget, the Glinda of the witchy pair. She said in a quavery voice, “Don’t leave us, Jane!”

  “I won’t, darling. I wouldn’t.”

  She looked so small, and so frightened . . . Then I caught myself. Oxytorin. I barked, “No electronics that can be traced. Not phones, not mobiles, not games, not anything. Do those kids have subdermal ID chips?”

  “No,” Jane said. I could see that she wanted to say more, much more, but not in front of Bridget. Fifteen minutes later, after Jane sent a hasty email to Frieda and John Barrington, we drove out the estate gates, heading toward the mountains.

  When Leila was one month pregnant, the ultrasound looked like any other baby. The same at two, five, and nine months. All fetuses have oversized heads, spindly little arms and legs. When Ethan was born, there was no way to tell he was a dwarf, except by another genescan. Eighty-five percent of dwarfs are born to average-sized parents, the result not of carrying the dominant gene but of a mutation during conception. Usually the parents don’t even realize the child will be a dwarf until the baby fails to grow like other children.

  But we, of course, knew. Ethan would be a dwarf. We engineered him to be a dwarf. Then he was born and scanned.

  A twentieth century religious writer once said that humanity needs the disabled to remind us of the fragility of health, and of “the power of life and its brokenness.” The nineteenth century mother of the famous Colonel Tom Thumb attributed her son’s dwarfism to her grief over the death of the family dog during her pregnancy. Leila and I had no such spiritual consolations, no such explanations for Ethan’s lack of dwarfism. The ones that science could offer were vague: Engineering fails. Genes jump. Chromosomes mutate. Accidents happen. Nature asserts herself.

  I bought the mountain cabin just after Leila left me. I think now that I wasn’t quite sane during that awful time. I’d retired from politics and hadn’t yet entered show-business management. I had nothing to do. There are notebooks I wrote then in which I talk about suicide, but I have no memory of doing the writing or thinking the thoughts. Eventually, that time passed. I left the cabin and never went back. Years later I deeded it over to Leila, who would go there sometimes with Ethan when he was small. She told me once, in a rare lapse into civility, that Ethan was happy at the cabin. He chased butterflies, hunted rocks, picked wildflowers. He calmed down up there, and he slept well in the sweet mountain air. Now the twins did the same, falling asleep on the back seat of the Lexus. Still Jane and I didn’t talk. But once she put her hand on the back of my neck. That was a gesture I’d dreamed about, longed for, would have given ten years of my life for. But not like this. Her touch wasn’t sexual, wasn’t romantic. It was motherly.

  We pulled up to the cabin just as the sun rose over the mountains, an hour before the Group was scheduled to break its story. Jane’s skin goose-fleshed as she opened the car door and the cold dawn air rushed in.

  “I’m going to carry them inside,” she said, the first words she’d spoken in an hour. “They need their sleep. Is the door locked?”

  “I have the key.”

  Mundane words, normal words. While below us, the human race was about to be altered at its core. The cabin, too, was cold. I started the generator—quicker than building a fire—while Jane, puffing a little, carried the girls one at a time into the bedroom. The cabin is small but it’s not primitive or austere; I’m not a fan of either. It has a main room with running water from a deep well, a comfortable bedroom, and a bathroom with full septic system. The original furniture had been sized for me, but evidently Leila had replaced it all. The sofa was hard to climb onto. My legs hurt.

  Jane emerged from the bedroom after depositing the last twin, closed the door, and sat down on a wing chair across from me. She said quietly, “You could have let me drive.” I didn’t answer.

  “Is there a radio here?”

  “There was. A satellite radio—the mountains don’t permit much other reception.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been here for a long time.”

  She got up and began opening cupboards in the kitchenette. The counters and appliances, like the furniture, had been replaced, but no new cabinets built above them. Jane had to squat to peer into shelves. She searched the two closets, one of which had not existed when I’d owned the cabin, then sat down again. “No radio. But a lot of food and equipment. Who uses this place?” Again I didn’t answer.

  “Barry, what’s our plan?”

  I looked at her then. No make-up, barely combed hair, huddled inside jeans and a green sweater that matched her eyes. She had never looked more beautiful to me.

  “My only plan was to get you away before some angry mob came after you. People aren’t going to like that their brains have been fucked with, and you’re a natural target, Jane.”

  “I know.” She smiled wanly. “I always have been, for anybody with a grudge. Why do you suppose that is?”

  “Because the perception is that you have it all.” I meant: beauty, talent, success, riches. I meant: my heart. She snorted. “Oh, right. I have a burnt-out career, four bad marriages, and wrinkles that Botox can’t touch. Barry, dear, you look tired. Why don’t you lie on the sofa and I’ll make you some warm milk.”

  “Don’t mother me!” It came out a snarl.

  She looked startled, then angry, then compassionate. Compassionate was the worst. “I only meant—”

  “That’s not you talking, it’s the genemod that the Group infected you with.” She turned thoughtful, considering this. Contrary to Ms. Resentful’s perception, Jane was not stupid. Finally she s
aid, “No, I don’t think so, because I think I would have reacted the same way even before all this started. If I saw you tired and discouraged, I’d have offered some comfort anyway.” This was true. All at once I saw that this was going to be more complicated than I thought. How could anybody determine which behavior was caused by increased oxytorin receptors, and which was innate?

  It was the old argument, genes versus free will, only now it was about to turn incendiary. Jane said, “I’m making you that warm milk.”

  But I was asleep before she could bring it to me.

  I woke to Belinda standing beside the sofa, staring at me flatly. “I want to go home.” Groggily I sat up. Everything hurt. “Where’s Jane?”

  “Her and Bridget went for a stupid walk. Take me home.”

  “I can’t. Not yet.”

  “I want to go home.”

  Painfully I climbed off the sofa and headed to the kitchenette. There was fresh coffee in a Braun on the counter, but I couldn’t reach it. Hating every second that Belinda watched me, I dragged a footstool from the fireplace to the counter and hoisted myself onto it. A part of my brain noticed dispassionately that I felt no nurturing impulses toward Belinda when she didn’t look more helpless than I felt. The coffee was hot and rich. Good coffee had always been important to Leila. I gulped it down and said, “How long ago did they leave on this walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She probably did know and wasn’t telling me, the brat.

  “I really don’t know, so stop thinking I’m a liar.”

  How did she do it? I’d read the literature on Arlen’s Syndrome. Subconscious processes in Belinda’s malevolent little brain were hypersensitive to six non-word signals: gesture and facial expression, even very tiny movements in either. Rhythm of movement. Bodily use of space. Objectics, such as dress and hairstyle. And what was called paralanguage: tone of voice, rate of verbal delivery, emphasis, and inflection. Taken together, they let her read my emotions like a Teleprompter, but she was not reading my mind. I had to remind myself of that. Nonetheless, for the first time I saw the rationale for burning witches at the stake.