So that’s it, Evelyn thought. The human race is remaking itself, and she’s worried about losing her job. Aloud, she said, “Things take time. You can’t do everything at once.”
“No—I know that. It’s just that the things that do get done seem to be mostly for the people at the top. And the distance between the top and the bottom just gets bigger … .”
Evelyn listened a few minutes longer, then cut the conversation off. She should not have expected her sister to understand, she thought wearily. If she understood, she’d be saving for an engineered child of her own.
Her sister was out and the banks were out. Where else was there, where else …
A crash from the kitchen made her jump. “Randy?” she called.
“It’s okay, it’s not anything,” he said. She got up and went to look. Randy was down on his knees, brushing together pieces of the blue-glass serving bowl. He looked up at her, scared.
“Randy! What are you doing? You broke our best bowl! You know you’re not supposed to get into that cupboard.”
“I was gonna make something in it. For when Dad gets home—for a surprise.” His voice trembled.
“I don’t care what you were going to do, you’re not allowed—and stop that. You’ll cut your hands, scraping it up that way. Get me the broom.”
He brought the broom and she swept up the pieces. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Randy said.
“Well, you ought to be. I don’t have time for this kind of thing, Randy. I have things to do.”
She knelt and ran her hand over the floor tiles, feeling for any slivers she had missed.
“Are you going to have the new baby soon?” Randy asked in a small voice.
“As soon as we can manage,” Evelyn said irritably.
“Costs a lot of money to have an engineered baby, doesn’t it?”
“It certainly does.”
“Is it really exciting?”
Evelyn looked up. Randy was plucking studiously at a towel that hung by the sink. Children, she thought. The times they pick to need reassurance.
“Come over here, Randy,” she said. Still kneeling, she put her arm around his waist as he came up. His eyes were large and brown—so like her own. “Sure, it’s exciting. But norm babies are too. Having an engineered baby is a good thing to do, because people like that can help us solve a lot of the world’s problems. Raising a baby is a lot of work, though. We’ll need you to help us.”
“Won’t she be smarter than me and everything?”
“Someday she will. For a long time she’ll be your little sister, and you’ll have to help her. Someday she’ll be smarter than all of us. But she’ll still be ours.”
When she had put Randy to bed, she came back to sit in the living room and think about money. She did not know where to turn. The tiny apartment, the crampedness that had never bothered her before, seemed to close in on her. She felt trapped and alone. Michael was tired, and he did not understand, and he was not going to try anymore. Even if she found someplace to borrow the money, she would have to convince him all over again that soma-typing mattered. She rubbed at her eyes in weary frustration. This child was the most important event in her life, but the decisions were still half his, and he could block her. In a flash of anger she thought, I ought to just leave. Then I could make my own choices.
She was shocked by the thought. Leave Michael? After five years of happy marriage? Besides, added a coolly rational part of her mind, if she left she would lose half the savings. She would never be able to pay for the surgery.
She stood up abruptly. Nonsense, nonsense. Michael was a good, kind man. Somehow they would work this all out.
The next morning was Saturday. Michael, with Randy helping, began cooking chicken and chopping vegetables for the next week’s meals. Evelyn could hear them talking in the kitchen while she spread out the family financial records on the desk in the bedroom. She did not doubt that Michael had been thorough, but in her restlessness she had to see for herself. She began going over Michael’s figures, checking the price increases against their savings and projected incomes.
Half an hour later, she called Michael. Her voice was strained. He came to the bedroom door, a paring knife in his hand, Randy close behind. “What is it, hon?”
“Michael, we have six thousand dollars more in savings than you put down here.”
He stared at her blankly for a few seconds. Then he frowned. “You know what that’s for.”
“We can replace it later,” she said, her voice rising. “We need it now. What are you trying to do?”
Michael touched Randy’s shoulder. “You go on and finish peeling the potatoes. Be careful with the knife, like I showed you. Your mother and I have to talk.” Randy looked from one to the other. Then he left.
Michael closed the door. He came over to the side of the bed near the desk and slowly sat down. “We’re going to have a second child,” he said. “But we already have one. No matter what we’ve done without, we’ve always put a little something aside for Randy’s education, so he would have that much security. That isn’t going to change now.”
“You’re telling me that? You’ve decided what my son needs, and you weren’t even going to discuss it with me?”
Michael’s face darkened. “He’s my son too.”
“Oh, I know you love Randy. That’s not the point. He won’t need the money for years, and by then we can replace it.”
“We shouldn’t be replacing it. We should be adding to it. It’s not going to be much in any event, with costs the way they are. We won’t be able to add much after the girl is born, with all the tests and psychologists and special schools—”
“So you just decided, you just decided all by yourself—”
Evelyn’s voice was rising, but Michael shouted over her. “What do you mean, I decided? It never occurred to me you’d want to use Randy’s money.”
“It’s too late for Randy. Whatever it costs, we have to make this child—”
“Right, right. We have to make her one of the masters of the earth.” He waved his hand in dismissal, but she flared back at him.
“You say that and you think it’s just an expression. But it’s real. They are the masters of the earth—the new human beings. Can’t you understand that? Whatever’s worth running, they run—politics, business, education—”
“Is that all that matters to you? Randy’s a person too. We can’t take everything away from him—”
“Then we’ll use a donor. If we use an engineered donor’s genes instead of yours, it’ll be cheaper, and we can afford everything.”
“Instead of my genes? When you’ve already had a child, and I haven’t? Oh, no. How about using a donor instead of your genes?”
“No. No.”
“Why not? The child would still be yours, more than Randy is mine—out of your own body, and with you from birth.”
“No.” Evelyn shook her head slowly back and forth. “I have to have my daughter.”
Michael laughed with a bitterness that shocked her. “Of course. You have to have your daughter. The new you that can do all the things you can’t. Do you really think you can live through a child?”
Evelyn’s face went cold. When she answered, her voice shook. “I don’t care what you say. She’s going to have the chance I didn’t. And she’ll be my daughter.”
“Mine too, believe me. So—no donors.”
“Then we’ll have to use Randy’s money.”
“No.”
Evelyn closed her hands and eyes tightly for a moment, then tried once more.
“Michael, listen. Randy is my son, my first child. He’ll always be special to me, even more just because he is a norm, because he’s like us. But we can’t afford to pretend. He’s only a norm.”
Michael stared. “So anything this other child needs—pretty hair, anything—is more important than Randy.”
“She is! She’s more important than any of us.”
“My God, Evelyn. What are you saying? A
family can’t live that way. If that’s the way it’s going to be, I don’t want an engineered child at all!”
“Then don’t have one!” She jumped to her feet. “You don’t deserve one!” He was just like all the other sheep. What had ever made her think she wanted his genes in a child of hers?
But Michael’s anger suddenly dissolved, and he sat shaking his head. “Evelyn, Evelyn, look what’s happening. We’ve waited for this for so long. We can’t let it set us against each other.”
She watched his homely face, twisted with concern, and felt a flood of contempt. It was the same contempt she felt for her own face in the mirror. Weak, she thought. The engineered are right to look down on people like him.
Michael came toward her, fumbling for her hands. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
Evelyn did not meet his eyes. A thought had occurred to her, simple and cool as first light. She could get most of the savings from him in exchange for custody of Randy.
Again she recoiled from her own thoughts, shocked and ashamed. To give up Randy, to sell him—Still, the small cool thoughts unfolded. She could afford it then—her child, using her genes and sperm from a donor. It would be cheaper. And better.
“We can work it out,” Michael was saying. “We’re both upset right now, that’s all. I didn’t mean to deceive you about Randy’s money, I really didn’t.”
“I know,” she said. “We’re both tired.” Never to see Randy again. Oh, the stab of loss at the thought. And yet, underneath, so deep she could almost ignore it, there ran a treacherous current of relief. Never again to be wrenched by pity and regret. No more to see his face, the mirror of her own: her own failure confirmed in the eyes of her son.
Michael’s hands were warm and tight around hers. He was her husband; he was a good man. Once more he said, “We’ll work it all out.”
She tried to smile. Still, she did not meet his eyes. “Of course we will,” she said. But she knew already that they would not work it out.
FREDERIK POHL
The Kindly Isle
A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for nearly fifty years. Pohl first broke into the professional SF world in 1939 as the nineteen-year-old editor of two SF magazines, Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He went on to found SF’s first continuing original anthology series (the famous Star series, lasting from 1953 to 1960), was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969 (during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos), and later served as consulting SF editor for Bantam, where he was responsible for the publishing of controversial works such as Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. He was SF’s first important literary agent, and, as such, played a vital role in encouraging publishing houses like Ballantine to develop the first category science-fiction lines. As a writer, he first came to prominence with a series of novels written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including the classic The Space Merchants—and has since become one of the genre’s most popular and respected authors. He has several times won Nebula and Hugo Awards, as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His novel Gateway (a Nebula and Hugo winner) is widely considered to be one of the best SF novels of the seventies. His many other books include the novels Man Plus, Wolfbane (with C. M. Kornbluth), Jem, and The Cool War, and the collections The Gold at the Starbow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are Heechee Rendezvous, a novel, and the collections The Years of the City and Pohlstars.
Here’s a wise and gentle new story by Pohl, in which he takes us to a friendly island paradise which is perhaps a little too good to be true …
I
The place they called the Starlight Casino was full of people, a tour group by their looks. I had a few minutes before my appointment with Mr. Kavilan, and sometimes you got useful bits of knowledge from people who had just been through the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the beaches. Not this time, though. They were an incoming group, and ill-tempered. Their calves under the hems of the bright shorts were hairy ivory or bald, and all they wanted to talk about was lost luggage, unsatisfactory rooms, moldy towels and desk clerks who gave them the wrong keys. There were a surly couple of dozen of them clustered around a placatory tour representative in a white skirt and frilly green blouse. She was fine. It was gently, “We’ll find it,” to this one and sweetly, “I’ll talk to the maid myself,” to another, and I made a note of the name on her badge. Deirdre. It was worth remembering. Saints are highly valued in the hotel business. Then, when the bell captain came smiling into the room to tell me that Mr. Kavilan was waiting for me—and didn’t have his hand out for a tip—I almost asked for his name, too. It was a promising beginning. If the island was really as “kindly” as they claimed, that would be a significant plus on my checklist.
Personnel was not my most urgent concern, though. My present task was only to check out the physical and financial aspects of a specific project. I entered the lobby and looked around for my real-estate agent—and was surprised when the beachcomber type by the breezeway stretched out his hand. “Mr. Wenright? I’m Dick Kavilan.”
He was not what I expected. I knew that R.T. Kavilan was supposed to be older than I, and I took my twenty-year retirement from government service eight years ago. This man did not seem that old. His hair was blond and full, and he had an all-around-the-face blond beard that surrounded a pink nose, bronzed cheeks and bright blue eyes. He didn’t think of himself as old, either, because all he had on was white ducks and sandals. He wore no shirt at all, and his body was as lean and tanned as his face. I had dressed for the tropics, too, but not in the same way: white shoes and calf-length white socks, pressed white shorts and a maroon T-shirt with the golden insignia of our Maui hotel over the heart. I understood what he meant when he glanced at my shoes and said, “We’re informal here—I hope you don’t mind.” Formal he certainly was not.
He was, however, effortlessly efficient. He pulled his open Saab out of the cramped hotel lot, found a gap in the traffic, greeted two friends along the road and said to me, “It’ll be slow going through Port, but once we get outside it’s only twenty minutes to Keytown”—all at once.
“I’ve got all day,” I said.
He nodded, taking occasional glances at me to judge what kind of a customer I was going to be. “I thought,” he offered, “that you might want to make just a preliminary inspection this morning. Then there’s a good restaurant in Keytown. We can have lunch and talk—what’s the matter?” I was craning my neck at a couple we had just passed along the road, a woman who looked like a hotel guest and a dark, elderly man. “Did you see somebody you wanted to talk to?”
We took a corner and I straightened up. “Not exactly,” I said. Somebody I had once wanted to talk to? No. That wasn’t right, either. Somebody I should have wanted to talk to once, but hadn’t, really? Especially about such subjects as Retroviridae and the substantia nigra?
“If it was the man in the straw hat,” said Kavilan, “that was Professor Michaelis. He the one?”
“I never heard of a Professor Michaelis,” I said, wishing it were not a lie.
In the eight years since I took the hotel job I’ve visited more than my share of the world’s beauty spots—Pago-Pago and the Costa Brava, Martinique and Lesbos, Bermuda, Kauai, Barbados, Tahiti. This was not the most breathtaking, but it surely was pretty enough to suit any tourist who ever lived. The beaches were golden and the water crystal. There were thousand-foot forested peaks, and even a halfway decent waterfall just off the road. In a lot of the world’s finest places there turns out to be a hidden worm in the mangosteen—bribe-hungry officials, or revolutions simmering off in the bush, or devastating storms. According to Dick Kavilan, the island had none of those. “Then why did the
Dutchmen give up?” I asked. It was a key question. A Rotterdam syndicate was supposed to have sunk fourteen million dollars into the hotel project I had come to inspect—and walked away when it was three-quarters built.
“They just ran out of money, Mr. Wenright.”
“Call me Jerry, please,” I said. That was what the preliminary report had indicated. Probably true. Tropical islands were a bottomless pit for the money of optimistic cold-country investors. If Marge had lived and we had done what we planned, we might have gone bust ourselves in Puerto Rico … if she had lived.
“Then, Jerry,” he grinned, turning into a rutted dirt road I hadn’t even seen, “we’re here.” He stopped the car and got out to unlock a chain-link gate that had not been unlocked recently. Nor had the road recently been driven. Palm fronds buried most of it and vines had reclaimed large patches.
Kavilan got back in the car, panting—he was not all that youthful, after all—and wiped rust off his hands with a bandanna. “Before we put up that fence,” he said, “people would drive in or bring boats up to the beach at night and load them with anything they could carry. Toilets. Furniture. Windows, frames and all. They ripped up the carpets where they found any, and where there wasn’t anything portable they broke into the walls for copper piping.”
“So there isn’t fourteen million dollars left in it,” I essayed.
He let the grin broaden. “Look now, bargain later, Jerry. There’s plenty left for you to see.”
There was, and he left me alone to see it. He was never so far away that I couldn’t call a question to him, but he didn’t hang himself around my neck, either. I didn’t need to ask many questions. It was obvious that what Kavilan (and the finders’ reports) had said was true. The place had been looted, all right. It was capricious, with some sections apparently hardly touched. Some were hit hard. Paintings that had been screwed to the wall had been ripped loose—real oils, I saw from one that had been ruined and left. A marble dolphin fountain had been broken off and carted a few steps away—then left shattered on the walk.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 41
