Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Amanda is my daughter—mine and Pierre’s. In every way that matters, that’s the whole and complete truth. You will never bother us again.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. Give me the notebooks now.”

  “I—I need some time to get them all together.”

  “Time to photocopy them, you mean. Not on your life. I’ll go with you wherever you want in order to get them, but I’m not letting you out of my sight until I’ve found and burned them all.”

  Klimus sat still for several seconds, thinking. The only sound was the soft whir of an electric clock. “You are one hard bitch,” he said at last, opening his lower-left desk drawer and pulling out a dozen small spiral-bound notebooks.

  “No, I’m not,” said Molly, gathering them up. “I’m simply my daughter’s mother.”

  Four months had passed. As she walked slowly across the lab, Shari Cohen looked like she’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Pierre was sitting on a lab stool. “Pierre,” she said, “I—I don’t know how to tell you this, but your most recent test results are…” She looked away. “I’m sorry, Pierre, but they’re wrong.”

  Pierre lifted a shaking arm. “Wrong?”

  “You botched the fractionation. I’m afraid I’m going to have to redo it.”

  Pierre nodded. “I’m sorry. I—I get confused sometimes.”

  Shari nodded as well. Her upper lip was trembling. “I know.” She was quiet for a long, long time. Then: “Maybe it’s time, Pierre, for you—”

  “No.” He said it as firmly as he could. He held his trembling hands out in front of him, as if to ward off her words. “No, don’t ask me to stop coming into the lab.” He exhaled in a long, shuddery sigh. “Maybe you’re right—maybe I can’t do the complex stuff anymore. But you have to let me help.”

  “I can carry on our work,” Shari said. “I can finish our paper.” She smiled. Their paper would blow people’s socks off. “They’ll remember you, Pierre—not just in the same breath as Crick and Watson, but as Darwin, too. He told us where we came from, and you’ve told us where we’re going.”

  She paused, contemplating. Pierre’s most recent discovery—probably, it was sad to say, his final discovery—was the DNA sequence that apparently governed the lowering of the hyoid bone in the throat, a sequence that was shifted out in Hapless Hannah’s DNA, but shifted in within that of Homo sapiens sapiens. And he’d shown Shari a DNA sample with the telepathic frameshift shifted in, although she didn’t know to whom it belonged, and only half believed Pierre’s assertions about what it was for.

  Pierre looked around the lab helplessly. “There must be something I can do. Wash beakers, sort files—something.”

  Shari looked over at the garbage pail, where the broken glass from a flask Pierre had dropped earlier in the day was resting. “You’ve given so much time to the project,” she said. “But—well, I know you’re the one who is supposed to quote the Nobel laureates, but didn’t Woodrow Wilson say, ‘I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.’ You can borrow mine; I’ll carry on for both of us. It’s time for you to relax. Spend some time with your wife and daughter.”

  Pierre felt his eyes stinging. He’d known this day would come, but this was too soon—much too soon.

  There was an awkward moment between them, and Pierre was reminded of that afternoon three and a half years earlier when he’d ended up holding Shari as she cried over the breakup of her engagement. She perhaps recognized the similarity, too, for, with a small smile, she moved closer and lightly wrapped her arms around him, not squeezing tightly, not constricting his body’s rhythmic dance.

  “You will be remembered, Pierre,” she said. “You know that. You’ll be remembered forever for what you discovered here.”

  Pierre nodded, trying to take comfort in the words, but soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.

  “Don’t cry,” said Shari softly. “Don’t cry.”

  He looked up at her and shook his head. “I know we did good work here,” he said, “but…”

  She brushed his hair off his forehead. “But what?”

  “Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can understand bits and pieces of it. But the big picture—the nucleotides, the enzymes, the reactions, the gene sequences…” He reached up with a trembling hand and wiped his cheek. “I don’t remember it all, and what I do remember, I don’t understand anymore.”

  Shari stroked his shoulder.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You did the work. You made the discoveries. I can finish it up from here.”

  Pierre looked up at her. “But what am I going to do now? I—I don’t know how to do anything except be a geneticist.”

  Shari spoke softly. “There was another phone message for you from Barnaby Lincoln at the Chronicle. Why not give him a call?”

  C h a p t e r

  43

  Eighteen Months Later

  Pierre was busy these days. Barnaby Lincoln was right—lobbying was satisfying work. And who knew? Someday it might even bear fruit. Meanwhile, Shari had finished up their jointly authored paper—“An intronic DNA mechanism for invoking frameshift mutations as a driving force in evolution”—and submitted it to Nature.

  But today was a day off from worrying about what the journal’s referees were going to make of the paper, a day off from working the phones and dictating letters.

  They couldn’t just go to the portrait studio at Sears; taking pictures of the Tardivel-Bond family was a little more complicated than that. Pierre had good moments and bad, and they had to wait more than an hour for him to have enough control to sit reasonably still. And Amanda—well, at three years of age, she was doing better dealing with other people, but it was still easier to keep her away from well-meaning but stupid adults who constantly said the wrong things, thinking that because she didn’t talk she also couldn’t hear.

  Molly had helped Pierre put on his clothes, as she did every day now. At first she’d thought about having him dress up in a suit and tie, all formal and staid, but that wasn’t Pierre, and she wanted to remember him the way he really was. Instead, she helped him put on the red Montreal Canadiens hockey jersey he was so fond of.

  For her part, Molly did dress a little more fancily than she normally would, wearing a powder blue silk top and a stylish black skirt. She even put on some lipstick and eye shadow.

  They’d borrowed the elaborate camera and tripod from the university. Two chairs were set up in front of the fireplace, and Molly carefully framed the shot.

  Amanda was in a lovely pink dress with small flowers on it. Molly had toyed with fighting the stereotype, but for today, at least, she wanted her daughter to look just like any other little girl. Sometimes such things did matter.

  Finally, Pierre said, “I think…I’m ready.”

  Molly smiled and helped him into one of the chairs. His right forearm was moving a little bit, but once he was settled in, Pierre moved his left hand over it, holding it steady. Molly sat down, smoothed out her clothes, and signed for Amanda to come and sit in her lap. She did so, enjoying flouncing across the room in her skirt.

  Molly kissed her forehead, and Amanda grinned. In her left hand Molly held the remote control for the camera. She pointed a finger at the lens and told Amanda to look into it and smile.

  Pierre lifted his left hand from his right arm and he, too, smiled when he saw that it was, at least for the moment, no longer flailing. He managed to slowly raise it up and drape it around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda reached up with her small hand and grasped three of her father’s fingers. Molly squeezed the remote, and first the preflash and then the real flash went off.

  Amanda bounced in her mother’s lap, startled but excited by the bright lights. Molly waited for her to settle down a bit before trying another exposure and, while she did so, she reflected on what a truly remarkable family portrait they were making. It wasn’t just a woman and her husband and their child, a mother, father, and daughter all very mu
ch in love. It was also, in a very real sense, a portrait of the human race—of silence, of speech, and of telepathy, of past, present, and future, of where it had come from, where it is, and where it is going.

  Molly’s telepathy, here, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, had been an accident—the result of a single nucleotide having squeezed its way into her DNA. But the genetic code to produce the telepathy neurotransmitter was there, hidden, frameshifted into something else, in the DNA of every man and woman on earth.

  Molly’s words came back to her: “Maybe someday far in the future, humanity might be able to handle something like this. But not now; it’s not the right time.”

  Not the right time.

  Pierre’s discoveries had been astounding: it was all in there. Not just what we had been. Not just codes to make tails and scales and hard-shelled eggs. Not just our fishy and amphibious and reptilian past. Not just the commands that played out the dance of ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny during an embryo’s development. Not just leftovers and discards.

  Not just junk.

  Yes, the past was in there. But so was the future. So was the blueprint, the master plan, what we would become.

  What was it she had said to Pierre, all those years ago? “God planned out all the broad strokes in advance—the general direction life would take, the general path for the universe—but, after setting everything in motion, he’s content to simply watch it all unfold, to let it grow and develop on its own, following the course he laid down.”

  She squeezed the camera’s remote again. Illumination was everywhere.

  Amanda looked up at her father and moved her hands. Why are we doing this?

  “We’re doing this,” said Pierre, “because we’re a family.” The words came out slowly but clearly.

  Amanda’s large brown eyes looked up at him. Her face contorted. She’d been trying for ages, practicing in secret with her mother. They’d even been interrupted one morning when Pierre had come up to the living room without them being aware of his arrival, but she’d never yet managed it. Still, she knew that this was indeed a very special moment, and so she tried again with all her might.

  The sound was raw, like the tearing of coarse paper, more aspirated breath than anything else. But it was also unmistakable, at least to someone who had longed to hear it. “I love you,” Amanda said, looking at her daddy. Pierre thought something in French, but then, smiling at his wife and hugging her close, reformulated the same thought in English.

  Life, thought Pierre Tardivel, doesn’t get any better than this.

  E p i l o g u e

  There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

  —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature

  Thirteen Years Later

  Valerie Beckett, first woman president of the United States, looked out at the crowd of five hundred on the White House lawn, most of them sitting on the metal folding chairs provided for the occasion but some in wheelchairs. Beyond the wrought-iron fence around the yard, hundreds of additional spectators and tourists watched in wonder. It was a bright, sunny day, the sky a perfect cerulean bowl, the scent of roses in the air. Beckett’s husband, First Gentleman Roger Ashton, smiled at her from the front row. Tiny TV cameras—so much smaller than the ones of just a few years before—were set up on thin-legged tripods. Flags rippled slightly in the gentle breeze.

  “We are gathered today to honor a great human being,” said Beckett, at the wooden podium with the presidential seal on its front. “His name is known to many of us as the cowinner with Shari Cohen-Goldfarb—who is here with us today—of a Nobel Prize for startling discoveries about the secrets locked in our DNA, discoveries that have changed our view of ourselves and our evolution. For some, no higher honor is possible, and I surely wouldn’t presume to suggest that any medal that I could bestow is more significant. But it isn’t really the medal that matters—it’s the selfless work that it represents. For ten years, the man we are honoring led the fight to get a federal law enacted barring insurance companies in all fifty-one states from discriminating against the born and the unborn based on their genetic profiles or family histories. Well, as you all know, during the last session of Congress, that very principle was passed into law and—”

  She paused for the applause, then continued.

  “—and so the Tardivel Bill is no more; it is now the Tardivel Statute, a new and binding law of the land. And today, we are gathered here to honor the memory of Dr. Pierre Jacques Tardivel, who fought until his dying day for its passage.”

  Molly, still beautiful at fifty, looked at her sixteen-year-old daughter, Amanda. She missed her husband—God, how she missed him—but, still, Molly was grateful beyond words for Amanda, and for the special bond they shared.

  Ready? thought Amanda.

  Molly nodded.

  I wish Dad could have lived to see this.

  Molly took her daughter’s hand. “He would be so proud of you,” she whispered.

  President Beckett continued, “I’m now going to ask Dr. Tardivel’s widow, Molly Bond, and his daughter, Amanda, to come up and accept this medal with the thanks of the people of the United States of America.”

  Molly rose to her feet. She and Amanda—stocky, with bangs that hung down to her eyebrows covering the subtle shelf of bone at the base of her forehead—moved up to stand next to the president, who shook each of their hands in turn. Molly stepped to the microphone. “Thank you,” she said. “I know this would have meant a lot to Pierre. Thank you all so much.”

  Amanda was still within her mother’s zone. I love you, she thought. Molly smiled. Amanda couldn’t really read her mind—but they were so close, so intertwined, the words didn’t need to be spoken aloud for Amanda to know that Molly was thinking, I love you, too.

  Amanda raised her hands and began to sign.

  Molly leaned back into the mike, interpreting. “Amanda says she misses her father every day, and loves him very much. And she says she’d like to recite a short speech that was one of Pierre’s favorites, a speech first made only a few hundred meters from this very spot half a century ago by another man who went on to win the Nobel Prize.”

  Amanda paused for a moment, then glanced at her mother, drawing strength from their bond. Then her hands began to move again in an intricate dance.

  ‘“I have a dream,’” said Molly, giving voice to Amanda’s gestures, ‘“that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.’”

  Amanda paused. Molly wiped tears from her eyes. Then Amanda’s hands moved once more. “By passing this law which makes us look beyond our genes,” said Molly, interpreting the signs again, “that great dream of a nation in which all its people truly are considered to be created equal has come another step closer to reality.”

  Amanda lowered her hands and looked at her mother, sharing a special thought just with her. She then turned and looked out at the crowd, which was applauding wildly.

  Pierre Tardivel’s daughter smiled.

  And a beautiful smile it was, too.

  A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

  Robert Sawyer’s novel The Terminal Experiment won the Nebula Award in 1995, and was also a finalist for the Hugo Award. He has also won Canada’s Aurora Award, the HOMer Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award.

  Rob is best known for his popular Quintaglio Ascension trilogy, the three volumes of which are allegories about the lives of Galileo (Far-Seer), Darwin (Fossil Hunter), and Freud (Foreigner). His other novels include Golden Fleece, End of an Era, and Starplex (which was serialized in Analog magazine).

  A native of Ottawa, Rob lives in Thornhill, Ontario, with Carolyn Clink, his wife of
twelve years. Together they edited the Canadian anthology Tesseracts 6.

  To find out more about Rob’s writing, visit his World Wide Web home page at:

  http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/sawyer