by Greg Bear
students sat in the front row, below the stage level and about ten
meters away from Letitia. She recognized Reena but not the
other two; they did not share classes with her.
"Did you know him?"
"No, not very well," Reena said. "He was in ny class."
"No ducks!" the third snorted.
"Trish, keep it interior, please. Reena's had it rough."
"He hadn't blitzed. He wasn't a superwhiz. Nobody expected
it."
"When was his incept?"
"I don't know," Reena said. "We're all about the stone age, within a couple of months. We're all the same model year,
same supplements. If it's something in the genotype, in the
supplements. ·
"I heard somebody say there had been five so far. I
haven't heard anything," the third said.
"I haven't either," said the second.
"Not in our school," Reena said. "Except for the
superwhizes. And none of them have died before now."
Letitia stepped back in the darkness, hand on mouth. Had
Lockwood actually died'?
She thought for a mad moment of stepping out of the
wings, going into the seats and telling the three she was sorry.
The impulse faded fast. That would have been intruding.
They weren't any older than she was, and they didn't
sound much more mature. They sounded scared.
In the morning, at the station room for pre-med secondary,
Brant told them that John Lockwood had died the day before.
"He had a heart attack," Brant said. Letitia intuited that was
not the complete truth. A short eulogy was read, and special
hours for psych counseling were arranged for those students
who felt they might need it.
The word "blitzing" was not mentioned by Brant, nor by
any of the PPCs throughout that day. Letitia tried to research the
subject but found precious few materials in the libraries accessed
by her mod. She presumed she didn't know where to look; it
was hard to believe that nobody knew what was happening.
The dream came again, even stronger, the next night, and ---Letitia
awoke out of it cold and shivering with excitement. She
saw herself standing before a crowd, no single face visible, for
she was in light and they were in darkness. She had felt, in the
dream, an almost unbearable happiness, grief mixed with joy, unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She loved and
did not know what she loved--not the crowd, precisely, not a
man, not a family member, not even herself.
She sat up in her bed, hugging her knees, wondering if
anybody else was awake. It seemed possible she had never been
awake until now; every nerve was alive. Quietly, not wanting
anybody else to intrude on this moment, she slipped out of bed
and walked down the hall to her mother's sewing room. There,
in a full-length cheval mirror, she looked at herself as if with
new eyes.
"Who are you?" she whispered. She lifted her cotton
nightshirt and stared at her legs. Short calves, lumpy knees,
thighs not bad--not fat, at any rate. Her arms were soft-looking,
not muscular, but not particularly plump, a rosy vanilla
color with strawberry blotches on her elbows where she leaned
on them while reading in bed. She had Irish ancestors on her
mother's side; that showed in her skin color, recessed cheekbones,
broad face. On her father's side, Mexican and German;
not much evidence in her of the Mexican. Her brother looked
more swarthy. "We're mongrels," she said. "I look like a
mongrel compared to PPC purebreds." But PPCs were not
purebred; they were designed.
She lifted her nightshirt higher still, pulling it over her
head finally and standing naked. Shivering from the cold and
from the memory of her dream, she forced herself to focus on
all of her characteristics. Whenever she had seen herself naked
in mirrors before, she had blurred her eyes at one feature,
looked away from another, special-effecting her body into a
more acceptable fantasy. Now she was in a mood to know
herself for what she was.
Broad hips, strong abdomen--plump, but strong. From her
pre-med, she knew that meant she would probably have little
trouble bearing children. "Brood mare," she said, but there was no critical sharpness in the words. To have children, she
would have to attract men, and right now there seemed little
chance of that. She did not have the "Attraction Peaks" so often
discussed on the TV, or seen faddishly headlined on the LitVid
mods; the culturally prescribed geometric curves allocated to so
few naturally, and now available to so many by design. Does
Your Child Have the Best Design for Success?
Such a shocking triviality. She felt a righteous anger
grow--another emotion she was not familiar with---and sucked
it back into the excitement, not wanting to lose her mood. "I
might never look at myself like this again," she whispered.
Her breasts were moderate in size, the left larger than the
fight and more drooping. She could indeed hold a stylus under
her left breast, something a PPC female would not have to
worry about for decades, if ever. Rib cage not really distinct;
muscles not distinct; rounded, soft, gentle-looking, face curious,
friendly, wide-eyed, skin blemished but not so badly it
wouldn't recover on its own; feet long and toenails thick,
heavily cuticle& She had never suffered from ingrown toenails.
Her family line showed little evidence of tendency to
cancer--correctible now, but still distressing--or heart disease
or any of the other diseases of melting pot cultures, of mobile
populations and changing habits. She saw a strong body in the
mirror, one that would serve her well.
And she also saw that with a little makeup, she could
easily play an older woman. Some shadow under the eyes, lines
to highlight what would in thirty or forty years be jowls, laugh
lines...
But she did not look old now.
Letitia walked back to her room, treading carefully on the
carpet. In the room, she asked the lights to turn on, lay down on
the bed, pulled the photo album Jane had given her from the top
of her nightstand and gingerly turned the delicate black paper pages. She stared at her great-grandmother's face, and then at
the picture of her grandmother as a little girl.
Individual orchestra was taught by three instructors in one
of the older drama classrooms behind the auditorium. It was a
popular aesthetic; the school's music boxes were better than
most home units, and the instructors were very popular. All
were PPCs.
After a half hour of group, each student could retire to box
keyboard, order up spheres of countersound to avoid cacophony, and practice.
Today, she practiced for less than half an hour. Then,
tongue between her lips, she stared into empty space over the
keyboard. "Countersound off, please," she ordered, and stood
up from the black bench. Mr. Teague, the senior instructor,
asked if she were done for the day.
"I have to run an errand," she said.
&n
bsp; "Practice your polyrhythms," he advised.
She left the classroom and walked around to the auditorium's
stage entrance. She knew Reena's drmna group would be
meeting there.
The auditorium was dark, the stage lighted by a few
catwalk spots. The drama group sat in a circle of chairs in one
illuminated corner of the stage, reading lines aloud from old
paper scripts. Hands folded, she walked toward the group. Rick
Fayette, a quiet senior with short back hair, spotted her first but
said nothing, glancing at Reena. Reena stopped reading her
lines, turned, and stared at Letitia. Edna Corman saw her last
and shook her head, as if this were the last straw.
"Hello," Letitia said.
"What are you doing here?" There was more wonder than
disdain in Reena's voice.
"I thought you might still..." She shook her head.
"Probably not. But I thought you might still be able to use
me."
"Really," Edna Corman said.
Reena put her script down and stood. "Why'd you change
your mind?"
"I thought I wouldn't mind being an old lady," Reena
said. "It's just not that big a deal. I brought a picture of my
great-grandmother." She took a plastic wallet from her pocket and
opened it to a copy she had made from the photo in the album.
"You could make me up like this. Like my great-grandmother."
Reena took the wallet. "You look like her," she said.
"Yeah. Kind of."
"Look at this," Reena said, holding the picture out to the
others. They gathered around and passed the wallet from hand
to hand, staring in wonder. Even Edna Corman glanced at it
briefly. "She actually looks like her great-grandmother."
Rick Fayette whistled with wonder. "You," he said, "will
make a really great old lady."
Rutger called her into his office abruptly a week later. She
sat quietly before his desk. "You've joined the drama class after
all," he said. She nodded.
"Any reason why?"
There was no simple way to express it. "Because of what
you told me," she said.
"No friction?"
"It's going okay."
"Very good. They gave you another role to play?"
"No. l'm the old lady. They'll use makeup on me."
"You don't object to that?"
"I don't think so."
Rutger seemed to want to find something wrong, but he
couldn't. With a faintly suspicious smile, he thanked her for her time. "Come back and see me whenever you want," he said.
"Tell me how it goes."
The group met each Friday, an hour later than her individual
orchestra. Letitia made arrangements for home keyboard
hookup and practice. After a reading and a half hour of
questions, she obtained the permission of the drama group
advisor, a spinsterish non-PPC seldom seen in the hallways,
Miss Darcy. Miss Darcy seemed old-fashioned and addressed
all of her students as either "Mister" or "Miss," but she knew
drama and stagecraft. She was the oldest of the six NG teachers
in the school.
Reena stayed with Letitia during the audition and made a
strong case for her late admittance, saying that the casting of
Rick Fayette as an older woman was not going well. Fayette
was equally eager to be rid of the part; he had another
nonconflicting role, and the thought of playing two characters
in this production worried him.
Fayette confessed his appreciation at their second Friday
meeting. He introduced her to an elfishly handsome, large-eyed,
slender group member, Frank Leroux. Leroux was much
too shy to go on stage, Fayette said, but he would be doing their
makeup. "He's pretty amazing."
Letitia stood nervously while Leroux examined her. "You've
really got a face," he said softly. "May I touch you, to see
where your contours are?"
Letitia giggled and abruptly sobered, embarrassed. "Okay,"
she said. "You're going to draw lines and make shadows?"
"Much more than that," Leroux said.
"He'll take a video of your face in motion," Fayette said.
"Then he'll digitize it and sculpt a laserfoam mold--much
better than sitting for a life mask. He made a life mask of me last year to turn me into the Hunchback of Notre Dame. No fun
at all."
"This way is much better," Leroux said, touching her skin
delicately, poking under her cheeks and chin, pulling back her
hair to feel her temples. "I can make two or three sculptures
showing what your face and neck are like when they're in
different positions. Then I can adjust the appliance molds for
flex and give."
"When he's done with you, you won't know yourself,"
Fayette said.
"Reena says you have a picture of your great-grandmother.
May I see it?" Leroux asked. She gave him the wallet and he
looked at the picture with squint-eyed intensity. "What a
wonderful face," he said. "I never met my great-grandmother.
My own grandmother looks about as old as my mother. They
might be sisters."
"When he's done with you," Fayette said, his enthusiasm
becoming a bit tiresome, "you and your great-grandmother will
look like sisters!"
When she went home that evening, taking a late pay metro
from the school, she wondered just exactly what she was doing.
Throughout her high school years, she had cut herself off from
most of her fellow students; the closest she came to friendship
had been occasional banter while sitting at the mods with John
Lockwood, waiting for instructors to arrive. Now she actually
liked Fayette, and strange Leroux, whose hands were thin and
pale and strong and slightly cold. Leroux was a PPC, but
obviously his parents had different tastes; was he a superwhiz?
Nobody had said so; perhaps it was a matter of honor among
PPCs that they pretended not to care about their classifications.
Reena was friendly and supportive, but still distant.
As Letitia walked up the stairs, across the porch into the door of their home, setting her keyboard down by the closet,
she saw the edge of a news broadcast in the living room.
Nobody was watching; she surmised everybody was in the
kitchen.
From this angle, the announcer appeared translucent and
blue, ghostly. As Letitia walked around to the premium angle,
the announcer solidified, a virtual goddess of Oriental-negroid
features with high cheekbones, straight golden hair and copper-bronze
skin. Letitia didn't care what she looked like; what she
was saying had attracted her attention.
"--revelations made today that as many as one-fourth of
all PPCs inceived between sixteen and seventeen years ago may
be possessors of a defective chromosome sequence known as
T56-WA 5659. Originally part of an intelligence enhancement
macrobox used in ramping creativity and mathematical ability,
T56-WA 5659 was refined and made a standard option in
virtually all pm-planned children. The effects of this defective
sequence are not yet known, but at least twenty children in our
city have already
died. They all suffered frown initial symptoms
similar to grand mai epilepsy. Nationwide casualties are as yet
unknown. The Rifkin Society is charging government regulatory
agencies with a wholesale coverup.
"The Parental Pre-Natal Design Administration has advised
parents of PPC children with this incept to immediately
contact your medicals and design specialists for advice and
treatment. Younger children may be eligible to receive whole-body
retroviral therapy. For more detailed information, please
refer to our LitVid on-line at this moment, and call--"
Letitia turned and saw her mother watching with a kind of
grim satisfaction. When she noticed her daughter's shocked
expression, she suddenly appeared sad. "How unfortunate,"
she said. "I wonder how far it will go."
Letitia did not eat much dinner. Nor did she sleep more than a couple of hours that night. The weekend seemed to
stretch on forever.
Leroux compared the laserfoam sculptures to her face,
turning her chin this way and that with gentle hands before the
green room mirror. As Leroux worked to test the various molds
on Letitia, humming softly to himself, the rest of the drama
group rehearsed a scene that did not require her presence. When
they were done, Reena walked into the green room and stood
behind them, watching. Letitia smiled stiffly through the hastily
applied sheets and mounds of skinlike plastic.
"You're going to look great," Reena said.
"I'm going to look old," Letitia said, trying for a joke.
"I hope you aren't worried about that," Reena said.
"Nobody cares, really. They all like you. Even Edna."
"I'm not worried," Letitia said.
Leroux pulled off the pieces and laid them carefully in a
box. "Just about got it," he said. "I'm getting so good I could
even make Reena look old if she'd let me."
Letitia considered for a moment. The implication, rather
than the meaning, was embarrassingly obvious. Reena blushed
and stared angrily at Leroux. Leroux caught her stare, looked
between them, and said, "Well, I could." Reena could not
argue without sinking them all deeper. Letitia blinked, then
decided to let them off this particular hook. "She wouldn't look
like a grandmother, though. I'll be a much better old lady."
