Women in Deep Time

by Greg Bear

  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 right 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 cuticled. 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.

  “Practice your polyrhythms,” he advised.

  She left the classroom and walked around to the auditorium’s stage entrance. She knew Reena’s drama 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 black 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?”

  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. I’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, largeeyed, 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 Asian-negroid features with high cheekbones, straight golden hair and copperbronze 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 pre-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 from initial symptoms similar to grand mal 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 wholebody 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.”

  “Of course,” Leroux said, picking up his box and the sculptures. He walked to the door, a mad headsman. “Like your great-grandmother.”

  For a long silent moment, Reena and Letitia faced each other alone in the green room. The old incandescent makeup lights glared around the cracked mirror, casting a pearly glow on the white walls behind them. “You’re a good actress,” Reena said. “It really doesn’t matter what you look like.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sometimes I wished I looked like somebody in my family,” Reena said.

  Without thinking, Letitia said, “But you’re beautiful.” And she meant it. Reena was beautiful; with her Levantine darkness and long black hair, small sharp chin, large hazelcolored almond eyes and thin, ever-so-slightly bowed nose, she was simply lovely, with the kind of face and bearing and intelligence that two or three generations before would have moved her into entertainment, or pushed her into the social circles of the rich and famous. Behind the physical beauty was a sparkle of reserved wit, and something gentle. PPCs were healthier, felt better, and their minds, on the average, were more subtle, more balanced. Letitia did not feel inferior, however; not this time.

  Something magic touched them. The previous awkwardness, and her deft destruction of that awkwardness, had moved them into a period of charmed conversation. Neither could offend the other; without words, that was a given.

  “My parents are beautiful, too. I’m second generation,” Reena said.

  “Why would you want to look any different?”

  “I don’t, I suppose. I’m happy with the way I look. But I don’t look much like my mother or my father. Oh, color, hair, eyes, that sort of thing…Still, my mother wasn’t happy with her own face. She didn’t get along well with my grandmother…She blamed her for not matching her face with her personality.” Reena smiled. “It’s all rather silly.”

  “Some people are never happy,” Letitia observed.

  Reena stepped forward and leaned over slightly to face

  Letitia’s mirror image. “How do you feel, looking like your grandmother?”

  Letitia bit her lip. “Until you asked me to join, I don’t think I ever knew.” she told about her mother giving her the album, and looking at herself in the mirror—though she did not describe being naked—and comparing herself with the old pictures.

  “I think that’s called an epiphany,” Reena said. “It must have been nice. I’m glad I asked you, then, even if I was stupid.”

  “Were you…” Letitia paused. The period of charm was fading, regrettably; she did not know whether this question would be taken as she meant it. “Did you ask me to give me a chance to stop being so silly and stand-offish?”

  “No,” Reena said steadily. “I asked you because we needed an old lady.”

  Looking at each other, they laughed suddenly, and the charmed moment was gone, replaced by something steadier and longer-lasting: friendship. Letitia took Reena’s hand and pressed it. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.” Then, with hardly a pause, Reena said, “At least you don’t have to worry.”

  Letitia stared up at her, mouth open, eyes searching.

  “Got to go home now,” Reena said. She squeezed Letitia’s shoulder with more than gentle strength, revealing a physical anger or jealousy that ran counter to all they had said and done thus far. She turned and walked through the green room door, leaving Letitia alone to pick off a few scraps of latex and adhesive.

  The disaster grew. Letitia listened to the news in her room late that night, whispers in her ear, projected ghosts of newscasters and doctors and scientists dancing before her eyes, telling her things she did not really understand, could only feel.

  A monster walked through her generation, but it would not touch her.

  Going to school on Monday, she saw students clustered in hallway
s before the bell, somber, talking in low voices, glancing at her as she passed. In her second period class, she learned from overheard conversation that Leroux had died during the weekend. “He was superwhiz,” a tall, athletic girl told her neighbor. “They don’t die, usually, they just blitz. But he died.”

  Letitia retreated to the old lavatory at the beginning of lunch break, found it empty, but did not stare into the mirror. She knew what she looked like and accepted it.

  What she found difficult to accept was a new feeling inside her. The young Letitia was gone. She could not live on a battlefield and remain a child. She thought about slender, elfin Leroux, carrying her heads under his arms, touching her face with gentle, professional admiration. Strong, cool fingers. Her eyes filled but the tears would not fall, and she went to lunch empty, fearful, confused.

  She did not apply for counseling, however. This was something she had to face on her own.

  Nothing much happened the next few days. The rehearsals went smoothly in the evenings as the date of the play approached. She learned her lines easily enough. Her role had a sadness that matched her mood. On Wednesday evening, after rehearsal, she joined Reena and Fayette at a supermarket sandwich stand near the school. Letitia did not tell her parents she would be late; she felt the need to not be responsible to anybody but her immediate peers. Jane would be upset, she knew, but not for long; this was a necessity.

  Neither Reena nor Fayette mentioned the troubles directly. They were fairylike in their gaiety. They kidded Letitia about having to do without makeup now, and it seemed funny, despite their hidden grief. They ate sandwiches and drank fruit sodas and talked about what they would be when they grew up.

  “Things didn’t used to be so easy,” Fayette said. “Kids didn’t have so many options. Schools weren’t very efficient at training for the real world; they were academic.”