Captive Dreams

by Michael Flynn

  “I don’t know,” she told the baby designer. “I don’t think I can go through this a second time.”

  “I understand how you feel just now; but in another year or two, you may be ready for another try. We keep learning, not only from Rachel, but from others like her. They teach us so much.”

  Karen rose, gathered her purse. “I’ll talk to Bill about it.”

  That evening she watched Rachel play by herself in her perfectly sealed-off world. She might as well have been on another planet for all the attention she paid to others, and Karen remembered that, even while nursing, the baby had seemed abstracted.

  When she put Rachel down for the night and turned off the light, Rachel began to cry and fuss. But when Karen returned and flipped the light on, she quieted immediately. Then she stuck her hand out—her right hand—and pointed to the light switch. Karen sighed and flipped it off again. In the darkness, Rachel laughed.

  The next day, Rachel sat up in the living room and stared at the light switch by the kitchen door. She fussed and pointed and fussed some more, until Karen relented and flipped it, turning on the pole lamp. That kept Rachel amused while Karen cut the vegetables for dinner. Her head swiveled back and forth from the lamp to the switch, from the switch to the lamp. Then something about the lamp caught her eye and she scrootched her face in ferocious concentration.

  That used to amuse Karen because she looked so terribly serious when she did it. But now she saw that it was only another symptom of that merciless focus that some autistics often had.

  Rachel’s attention came to rest on the lamp cord. She looked back at the switch, scanned the wall to the socket, then the cord to the lamp.

  She did this several times—repetitiveness being another symptom of autism—and then, unexpectedly and unexpectedly fast, she crawled across the carpet toward the lamp cord.

  Karen dropped the celery and the chopping knife and ran across the room and scooped up Rachel before she could grab the cord. “No, no, no!” she cried. “You could hurt yourself!”

  But Rachel paid her not the least attention. She strained in Karen’s arms, still trying to get to the lamp cord. It was as if her mother were nothing more than an inanimate obstacle keeping her from reaching her goal. “No, Rachel!” she cried, although the child showed no reaction to her name. “You could get electrocuted and die.”

  And the hateful thought arose unbidden that that might really be best for everyone.

  Bill laid his fork down on the plate so carefully that no sound could be heard. He stared across the table at Karen. “What do you mean ‘we should send her back’?”

  Karen would not look at him but fiddled with the spaghetti with her fork, twisting it around and around. “She’s still under warranty. Two years, they said. We can send her back for any reason related to the design…”

  “Kill her.”

  Karen shook her head violently. “No, no, no. We just sign some papers saying that this is the best thing for her. Then the hospital takes her and…She just goes to sleep. Really, Bill, it’s the merciful thing to do. She would never have had an adequate quality of life. She would never have been normal. And how could I have gotten my work done if I were supervising therapy ten hours a day, like they said. For at least five years.”

  “I would help…”

  “Bill, you’re on the road half the time. How much help would you be?” Most of her spaghetti was wound up on her fork by then. She lifted the fork and it slid off onto the plate. Karen blinked in surprise, then began winding the spaghetti up again. “Promise me you’ll think about it, at least.”

  Doctor deNangle was all assurance. He met them in a different office, in the other wing of the hospital. It was an altogether more spartan room. The walls sported diplomas, but no smiling babies. There was an antiseptic smell to the air. Dr. deNangle sat across the desk from them with his hands clasped into a ball atop it.

  “Ethical progress always meets with resistance,” he explained. “Alarmists like to go on about a so-called ‘slippery slope,’ but, people are resilient and once the step is taken, they get used to it. Now it is the law of the land. The world didn’t come to an end.”

  Bill opened his mouth to say that at least one world would come to an end, but before he could speak, the doctor explained how the body parts could be used to save the lives of other children, children who would have a more fulfilling life than Rachel could ever have had. “It would maximize total human happiness, and give her life meaning,” he insisted. “She would have lived for a purpose.”

  Bill saw the pain in Karen’s eyes, and knew that pain would only worsen. Trying to care for an autistic child would suck the life out of her, leaving only a husk of the vivacious woman he had married. He thought the baby was smarter than she seemed, but he could not deny that she had withdrawn into a self-contained world of her own.

  Karen was right. His job did take him out of town, out of state, sometimes even out of country for days or weeks at a time. There was a pending project in Turkey that might last six months, continuous residence there. All the labor would fall on Karen, and that was not really fair. He really could not ask that of her.

  Leaving the doctor’s office, Bill had still not said anything. Ultimately, on the forms the doctor had given them to fill out, his signature was not strictly required. But it would delay matters—there would be a review board—and it would drive a wedge between Karen and him that might not be removed. Silently, he reached out and took her hand, and their fingers intertwined.

  At the door, after a tense, uncomfortable visit, as Karen and Bill were leaving, Sarah’s stone-tight face crumbled and she told Karen that she would never speak to her again. “It’s horrible what you are doing. Horrible!”

  Karen broke into tears. “You can’t think I want to do it! But it’s the best thing for all of us.” Bill gave his mother-in-law a disapproving glare. It really wasn’t any of her business. There was no place on the Warranty Return forms for a grandmother’s signature.

  Andrew was not happy, either. He put his arm around his wife and guided her back inside the house; then he returned to the door. “It was a shock to her,” he told Karen and Bill. “She’ll get over it. You just have to give her time.”

  Karen was crying too hard to answer, but Bill gave his father-in-law a nod. Sarah and Karen were mother and daughter, after all. Sarah would not cut her off completely.

  Later, Andrew went to his wife, who sat in the bedroom with a photograph of Rachel. Like Karen, she was crying unreservedly, and Andrew thought it was for much the same reason. It was a hard decision to make, but he knew Karen had not made the decision lightly. It had to have been hard for her, as well. It had to have been hard to let go.

  He told Sarah what he had told their daughter. “Honey, you’ll get over it,” he said as he sat down beside her. “We have other grandchildren. Johnny’s two boys, and Betty’s girl. And Karen and Bill can have another baby, one who doesn’t have all those neurological disorders.”

  “It’s just so awful…”

  “They’re not doing anything criminal. It’s legal. And more and more people are doing it. People won’t accept inferior work anymore. Remember Joanna and Harry Douthet? Their boy was almost two years old, and that’s the limit under the law.”

  Sarah raised to him red-hot eyes. “Don’t tell me you agree with them! Please don’t tell me that!”

  Andrew shook his head. “No. No, I don’t. But it’s their baby. We can’t impose our opinions on them. And you know, you know that, that Rachel would never have had a full life. Maybe Karen was right when she said this was the best decision for their daughter.”

  But Sarah would not be consoled and after a while Andrew gave up and left her to cry alone.

  Jessie was horrified when they told her. They had been having drinks on the Singers’ patio deck, enjoying the brisk autumn air. A sense of peace and contentment had settled over Karen since she had made her decision, and she had been certain that Jessie would share h
er happiness—or at least her relief.

  But Charlie Singer settled back into his great stone face, and stared at her and Bill as if they had become parents manqué, and Jessica Burton-Peeler seemed genuinely angry. “You can’t do that,” she said. “Rachel is your baby. She’s been part of your family for, what, eight months. Part of your life.”

  But Karen was thinking that Rachel would have become not only a part of her life, but the whole of it. A parasite eating up every hope and dream she had ever had. “She wasn’t really a part of the family,” she told their friends. “She didn’t connect to anyone. She didn’t relate. Her autism would probably have gotten worse. It would have been cruel to force her to live like that. It wasn’t a life worth living.”

  “Lebensunwertes Leben,” said Charlie, breaking silence and the great stone face.

  Bill scowled at him. “What does that mean?”

  Charlie shook his head as if to clear it. “Just a term they once used, the last time they looked for the superman. Quality of life…And God help you if you fall below the lower tolerance limit.”

  “You’re geneticists, both of you,” Karen said. “I thought you’d understand.”

  Jessie’s mouth flattened into a line; but she managed to say, “Maybe that’s the point. We do. Karen, you can’t just up and kill her!”

  And who was this outsider telling her what she could and couldn’t do. “We won’t be killing her,” Karen explained. “It’s all done in a hospital. And, and Dr. deNangle agrees with us.”

  “Well,” said Charlie, “good for him.”

  It was a short walk home, but it seemed longer. Evening fell earlier this time of year, but the streetlamps lighted their way. “That Charlie is such a prig,” Bill ventured when they had rounded the bend onto the Edward Road section of the circle and were out of earshot of the Singer home. “I never thought he would be one of them.”

  “Isn’t the Center named for him? That’s why I thought he would…”

  Bill shook his head, took Karen by the elbow so they could walk more closely together. “Different Singers. No relation.”

  “And Jessie…The way she looked at me.”

  “She can’t stop us. That’s against the law. It’s our choice.”

  Karen wasn’t really listening. “I don’t think I could go over there again. For dinner, I mean, or drinks.”

  Bill glanced behind toward the curve in the road. “I don’t think they’ll be asking.”

  It was a wind-whipped autumn day when Karen Brusco took back her perfect baby. Red and yellow lurked among the bushes, stained the sumac and hazel, and spotted the maples with rust. Cyclones of fallen leaves tumbled and swirled in the air, and Karen responded with her own sigh of regret.

  It wasn’t as bad as she had feared. The protesters had been kept by law across the street, and the Center had cleverly made the entrance common to the rest of the hospital so that they would not know why any particular person was entering. There had been a celebrated incident several years ago when the protesters had shouted at a woman taking her baby in for a leukemia treatment, thinking that she was exercising her rights under the Quality of Life law. That had been enough for the courts to enjoin silence on all protesters.

  Dr. deNangle was waiting for them in the lobby, and led them not to the right, to the Baby Design Center, but to the left, down a long hallway to a cheerful and colorfully appointed waiting room. “You’ll see,” he told them as he held the door for them. “We learn a lot from these cases, and next time things will work out better. Every year we learn more about which genes to alter to get the results we want. Don’t let this discourage you. Sometimes things just don’t work out; but you can try again. This,” he said, waving about, “is the Departure Lounge. You can say goodbye to Rachel here. A nurse will be with you shortly.”

  He cautioned them that the next couple were scheduled at the quarter hour and it was hospital policy not to have multiple clients in the room at the same time. Then he left through a set of swinging doors and they heard him very briefly call out to someone with a number before the doors swung shut and enclosed them in silence.

  Karen did not understand how she was supposed to say goodbye to something that paid no attention, that would not even look at her. And indeed, no sooner had she set Rachel on the carpet than the child crawled off to a pile of toys that were kept in the room. Patiently, she began sorting them, placing them in rows, aligning them carefully, but in no discernable order. A ball, some blocks, a plastic car, a plush cat,…

  Bill said, “Well, good-bye, Rachel,” with a sort of awkward self-consciousness.

  Rachel waved an arm. “Ba-ba,” she said, and Karen almost believed she had said “bye-bye,” except she continued to jerk the arm and repeat “ba-ba-ba-ba” until Bill reached down and picked her up. Then she stretched her arms out toward the toys that she had been setting in rows, crying “na da! na da!” over and over.

  It was a relief when the nurse came out through the same set of swinging doors. She had a flatscreen in her hands and looked up from it. “Karen Brusco?”

  Karen jerked her head up and down in small motions, but did not speak up.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Brusco, but you’ll have to speak aloud for the record. And I’ll need to see some identification to make sure you have the rights to return this baby.”

  “Yes,” said Karen. “Yes, I’m Karen Brusco,” and she pulled out a Federal Identity Card from her purse.

  The nurse turned to Bill, and he seemed about to affirm his own identity, but the nurse instead indicated the baby in his arms.

  “And is this Rachel Brusco?”

  “Yes,” said Karen; and Bill, in order to register his presence, also said, “Yes.”

  “Could you remove her shoes, please? I need to compare her footprints with those made at birth.” She looked up. “It’s procedure. We wouldn’t want to process the wrong baby.”

  They did so, and the nurse placed the bare feet against the scanner on her flat screen. While she was doing so, she said to Karen, “I know how hard this is for you. Believe me, I know. This is the worst day of your life, isn’t it? It was for me. No, go ahead, dear. It’s okay to cry. Lots of mothers do. It’s part of the grieving process. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we hoped.”

  But what Karen felt then was not sorrow, so much as a vast relief. The nurse was right. She had done the right thing for everyone—for herself, for Bill, and even for poor Rachel, who would never have been truly happy.

  The nurse took the baby from her arms and Karen watched her as she passed through the doors to the part of the hospital where babies were put to sleep.

  It was a long time afterward, but eventually Sarah began to speak to her daughter again. But it wasn’t the same; and it was never the same ever again. Sarah remained unconvinced. She remembered how little Rachel had stared solemnly and intently at things, almost as if she were studying them. She had never laughed much, but surely gravity was not a capital offense.

  There had been a picture of Rachel on her dresser, the one that had been taken shortly after Bill and Karen had brought her home, and before the neurological problems had surfaced. The baby had such a smile on her face.

  At Andrew’s urging, Sarah put the photo away in a drawer. But every now and then, when no one else was around, she opened the drawer, and looked at the picture, and remembered Rachel.

  AFTERWORD TO "HOPEFUL MONSTERS"

  This is one of the new stories; and the title admits of multiple readings, not all of them comfortable. The search for the superman, now called “transhumanism,” is fraught with peril, not least in that to proceed from the present state A to the future state C, we often must pass through the intermediate state B. And B can be very messy.

  The skeleton of the story was suggested to me by a scenario in “A Curious Encounter with a Philosopher from Nowhere” by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (First Things v.120, February 2002) in which he reflected upon his debate with Peter Singer. Singer was then
an advocate of post-birth euthanasia for lives unworthy of life, and Fr. Neuhaus mused on what things might be like if it became normal. The scenario is used with the earlier permission of the late Fr. Neuhaus and the later concurrence of George Weigel, executor of his estate.

  The other element—and what makes it a science fiction story—was suggested by a chapter in Mary Midgley’s book Evolution as a Religion (Routledge Classics, 2002), in which she discusses the problems inherent in genetic engineering and the search for the superman; viz., on which children will we experiment? And what sort of people conduct such experiments?

  The difficulties of achieving design intent with multiply-coupled design parameters came up while developing course materials for teaching a seminar in Design for Six Sigma. For those brave enough, reference Design for Six Sigma, by Kai Yang and Basem El-Haik, specifically their Chapter 8 on “Axiomatic Design.”

  The time setting for the story is later than both the preceding stories, as Singer and Peeler have become SingerLabs and are already major players in the biotech/nanotech fields. A minor touch: Rachel’s pediatrician, Dr. Khan, was Ethan’s pediatrician in “Captive Dreams” and the on-call doctor for the nursing home in “Melodies of the Heart.” There is also an incidental mention of “the computer guru around the other side of the ring road…”

  These three stories all involve children and families, so Nancy Kress’ GoH speech at that long-ago Balticon must have made an impression.

  PLACES WHERE THE ROADS DON'T GO

  Jared Holtzmann and Kyle Buskirk met in college and became from the start fast friends. In part, this was quite literal, for they were both track stars who had set State records in their respective high schools—Kyle in the 100-meter dash and Jared in the 5000-meter run. Kyle used to joke that he could win fifty races to every one of Jared’s, and Jared would counter that Kyle was always rushing into things.