Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Caroline jumps. She jumps with her hind legs out straight, one in front and one in back. She runs in circles and jumps again. Dmitri catches her.

  “No, no,” Mr. Privitera says. “Not like that. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque efface. Now the lift. Dimitri, you are handling her like a sack of grain. Like this.”

  Mr. Privitera picks up Caroline. My ears raise. But Mr. Privitera is safe. Mr. Privitera can touch Caroline. Dmitri can touch Caroline. Carlos can touch Caroline.

  Dmitri says, “It’s the damn dog. How am I supposed to learn the part with him staring at me, ready to tear me from limb to limb? How the hell am I supposed to concentrate?”

  John Cole sits next to me. John says, “Dmitri, there’s no chance Angel will attack you. His biochip is state-of-the-art programming. I told you. If you’re in his ‘safe’ directory, you’d have to actually attack Caroline yourself before Angel would act, unless Caroline told you otherwise. There’s no real danger to break your concentration.”

  Dmitri says, “And what if I drop her accidentally? How do I know that won’t look like an attack to that dog?”

  Caroline sits down. She looks at John. She looks at Dmitri. She does not look at me. She smiles.

  John says, “A drop is not an attack. Unless Caroline screams—and we all know she never does, no matter what the injury—there’s no danger. Believe me.”

  “I don’t,” Dmitri says.

  Everybody stands quiet.

  Mr. Privitera says, “Caroline, dear, let me drop you. Stand up. Ready—lift.”

  Caroline smells surprised. She stands. Mr. Privitera picks up Caroline. She jumps a little. He picks her up over his head. She falls down hard. My ears raise. Caroline does not scream. She is not hurt. Mr. Privitera is safe. Caroline said Mr. Privitera is safe.

  “See?” Mr. Privitera says. He breathes hard. “No danger. Positions, please. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque efface, lift.” Dmitri picks up Caroline. The music gets loud. John says in my ear, “Angel—did Caroline go away from her house last night?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Where did Caroline go?”

  “Left four blocks, right one block. Caroline gave money.”

  “The bakery,” John says. “Did she go away to any more places, or did she go home?”

  “Caroline goes home last night.”

  “Did anyone come to Caroline’s house last night?”

  “No people come to Caroline’s house last night.”

  “Thank you,” John says. He pats me. I feel happy.

  Caroline looks at us. A woman ties a long cloth on Caroline’s waist. The woman gives Caroline a piece of wood. Yesterday I ask John what the wood is. Yesterday John says it is a fan. The music starts, faster. Caroline does not jump. Yesterday Caroline jumps with the fan. “Caroline?” Mr. Privitera says. “Start here, dear.”

  Caroline jumps. She still looks at John. He looks at me.

  Some woman here smells of yogurt and a bitch collie in heat.

  Caroline opens the bedroom door. She comes out. She wears jeans on her hind legs. She wears a hat on her head. It covers all her fur. She walks to the door. She says to me, “Stay, you old fleabag. You hear me? Stay!”

  I walk to the door.

  “Christ.” Caroline opens the door a little way. She pushes her body through the door. She closes the door. I push through the door hard with her.

  “I said stay!” Caroline opens the door again. She pushes me. I do not go inside. Caroline goes inside. I follow Caroline.

  “Take two,” Caroline says. She opens the door. She walks away. She goes back. She closes the door. She opens the door. She closes the door. She turns around. She goes through the door and closes it hard. She is very fast. I am inside alone.

  “Gotcha, Fido!” Caroline says through the door.

  I howl. I throw me against the door. I bark and howl. The light goes on in my head. I howl and howl.

  Soon Caroline comes through the door. A man holds her arm. He smells of iron. He talks to a box.

  “Subject elected to return to her apartment, sir, rather than have me accompany her to her destination. We’re in her apartment now.” Caroline grabs the box. “John, you shit, how dare you! You had the dog biowired! That’s an invasion of privacy, I’ll sue your ass off, I’ll quit the company, I’ll—”

  “Caroline,” John’s voice said. I look. There is no John smell. John is not here. Only John’s voice is here. “You have no legal grounds. This man is allowed to accompany you, according to the protection contract you signed. You signed it, my dear. As for quitting the City Ballet . . . That’s up to you. But while you dance for us, Angel goes where you do. If he gets too excited over not seeing you, the biosignal triggers. Just where were you going that you didn’t want Angel with you?”

  “To turn tricks on street corners!” Caroline yells. “And I bet he has a homing device embedded in him, too, doesn’t he?”

  She smells very angry. She is angry at me. I lie on the floor. I put my paws on my head. It is not happy here.

  The man says, “Departing the apartment now, sir.” He leaves. He takes the small box.

  Caroline sits on the floor. Her back is against the door. She looks at me. My paws are on my head. Caroline smells angry.

  Nothing happens.

  A little later Caroline says, “I guess it’s you and me, then. They set it up that way. I’m stuck with you.”

  I do not move my paws. She still smells angry.

  “All right, let’s try another approach. Disarm the enemy from within. Psychological sabotage. You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you? What did they give you, a five-year-old’s IQ? Angel . . .”

  I look at Caroline. She says my right name.

  “. . . tell me about Sam’s cat.”

  “What?”

  “Sam’s cat. You said that first day you came home with me that you smelled a cat on Sam, the day doorman. Do you still smell it? Can you tell what kind of cat it is?”

  I am confused. Caroline says nice words. Caroline smells angry. Her back is too straight. Her fur is wrong.

  “Is it a male cat or a female cat? Can you tell that?”

  “A female cat,” I say. I remember the cat smell. My muscles itch. “Did you want to chase it?”

  “I must never chase cats. I must protect Caroline.”

  Caroline’s smell changes. She leans close to my ear.

  “But did you want to chase it, Angel? Did you want to get to behave like a dog?”

  “I want to protect Caroline.”

  “Hoo boy. They did a job on you, didn’t they, boy?”

  The words are too hard. Caroline still smells a little angry. I do not understand.

  “It’s nothing compared to what they’re doing in South America and Europe,” she says. Her body shakes.

  “Are you hurt?” I say.

  Caroline puts a hand on my back. The hand is very soft. She says no words.

  I am happy. Caroline talks to me. She tells me about dancing. Caroline is a dancer. She jumps and runs in circles. She stands high on her hind legs. People come in cars to watch her. The people are happy when Caroline dances.

  We walk outside. I protect Caroline. We go many places. Caroline gives me cake and hot dogs. There are many smells. Sometimes Caroline and I follow the smells. We see many dogs and many cats. The man with the small box comes with us sometimes. John says the man is safe.

  “What if I tell Angel you’re not ‘safe’ ?” Caroline says to the man. He follows us on a long walk. “What if I order him to tear you limb to limb?” She smells angry again.

  “You don’t have programming override capacity. The biochip augmenting his bioenhancement is very specific, Ms. Olson. I’m hardwired in.”

  “I’ll bet,” Caroline says. “Did anybody ask Angel if he wants this life?”

  The man smiles.

  We go to Lincoln Center every day. Caroline dances there. She dances in the day. She dances at night.
More people watch at night.

  John asks me where Caroline and I go. Every day I tell him.

  Nobody tries to touch Caroline. I protect her.

  “I can’t do it,” Caroline tells a man on the street corner. The man stands very close to Caroline. I growl soft. “For God’s sake, Stan, don’t touch me. The dog. And I’m probably being watched.”

  “Do they care that much?”

  “I could blow the whistle on the whole unofficial charade,” Caroline says. She smells tired. “No matter what Privitera’s delusions are. But then we’d lose our chance, wouldn’t we?”

  “Thanks for the time,” the man says, loud. He smiles. He walks away.

  Later John says, “Who did Caroline talk to?”

  “A man,” I say. “He wants the time.”

  Later Caroline says, “Angel, we’re going tonight to see my mother.”

  4.

  Uemonstrators dyed the fountain at Lincoln Center blood red.

  They marched around the gruesome jets of water, shouting and resisting arrest. I sprinted across the plaza, trying to get there to see which side they were on before the police carted all of them away. Even from this distance I could tell they weren’t dancers, not with those thick bodies. The electronic placards dissolved from HOW MANY MUST DIE FROM DENYING EVOLUTION! to FREE MEDICAL RESEARCH FROM GOVERNMENT STRAITJACKETS! to MY BODY BELONGS TO ME! Pro-human bioenhancement, then. A holograph projector, which a cop was shutting down, spewed out a ten-foot-high holo of Jane and June Welsh, Siamese twins who had been successfully separated only after German scientists had bioenhanced their bodies to force alterations in major organs. The holo loop showed the attached twins dragging each other around, followed by the successfully separated twins waving gaily. The cop did something and Jane and June disappeared.

  “They died,” I said to a demonstrator, a slim boy wearing a free my body! button. “Ultimately, neither of their hearts could stand the stress of bioenhancement.”

  He glared at me. “That was their risk to take, wasn’t it?”

  “Their combined IQ didn’t equal your weight. How could they evaluate risk?”

  “This is a revolution, lady. In any revolution you have casualties that—” A cop grabbed his arm. The boy took a wild swing at him and the cop pressed his nerve gun to the boy’s neck. He dropped peacefully, smiling.

  Abruptly more people gathered, some of them wilier than the boy. Demonstrators stood with their hands on their heads, singing slogans. Media robocams zoomed in from the sky; the live crews would be here in minutes. A group of counterdemonstrators formed across the plaza, in front of the Met. I backed away slowly, hands on my head, not singing—and stopped abruptly halfway across the chaotic plaza.

  An old woman in a powerchair was watching the demonstration with the most intense expression I had ever seen. It was as if she were watching a horrifying execution, judging it judiciously as art. Bodyguards flanked the chair. She wore an expensive, pale blue suit and large, perfectly matched pearls. Her wrinkled, cold face was completely familiar. This was how Caroline Olson would look in forty years, if she refused all cosmetic treatment.

  She caught me watching her. Her expression didn’t change. It passed over me as if I didn’t exist.

  I took the chance. “Ms. Olson?”

  She didn’t deny the name. “Yes?”

  “I’m a reporter with New York Now, doing an article on the New York City Ballet. I’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter Caroline, if that’s all right.”

  “I never give interviews.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Just a few informal questions—you must be so proud of Caroline. But are you worried about her safety in light of the recent so-called ballerina murders?”

  She shocked me. She smiled. “No, not at all.”

  “You’re not?”

  She gazed at the break-up of the demonstration. “Do you know the work on dancers’ bodies they’re doing in Berlin?”

  “No, I—”

  “Then you have no business interviewing anyone on the subject.” She watched the last of the demonstrators being dragged away by the cops. “The New York City ballet is finished. The future of the art lies with bioenhancement.”

  I must have looked like a fish, staring at her with my mouth working. “But Caroline is the prima ballerina, she’s only twenty-six—”

  “Caroline had a good run. For a dancer.” She made a signal, an imperious movement of her hand, and one of the bodyguards turned her chair and wheeled it away.

  I trotted after it. “But, Ms. Olson, are you saying you think your daughter and her whole company should be replaced by bioenhanced dancers because they can achieve higher lifts, fewer injuries, more spectacular turn out—”

  “I never give interviews,” she said, and the other bodyguard moved between us.

  I gazed after her. She had spoken about Caroline as if her daughter were an obsolete Buick. It took me a moment to remember to pull out a notebook and tell it what she had said.

  Someone dumped something into the fountain. Immediately the red disappeared and the water spouted clear once more. A bioenhanced dog trotted over and lapped at the water, the dog’s owner patiently holding the leash while his pink-furred, huge-eyed poodle drank its fill.

  After an hour at a library terminal at New York Now, I knew that Anna Olson was a major contributor to the American Ballet Theater but not to the New York City Ballet, where her daughter had chosen to dance. Caroline’s father was dead. He had left his widow an East Side mansion, three Renoirs, and a fortune invested in Peruvian sugar, Japanese weather-control equipment, and German pharmaceuticals. According to Ballet News, mother and daughter were estranged. To find out more than that, I’d need professional help.

  Michael didn’t want to do it. “There’s no money for that kind of research, Susan. Not to even mention the ethics involved.”

  “Oh, come on, Michael. It’s no worse than using criminal informers for any other story.”

  “This isn’t your old newspaper job, Susie. We’re a feature magazine, remember? We don’t use informants, and we don’t do investigative reporting.” He leaned against his desk, his peeled-egg face troubled.

  “The magazine doesn’t have to do any investigating at all. Just give me the number. I know you know it. If I’d been doing the job I should have for the last two years instead of sulking because I hate New York, I’d know it, too. Just the number, Michael. That’s all. Neither you nor the magazine will even be mentioned.”

  He ran his hand through his hair. For the first time, I noticed that it was thinning. “All right. But Susan—don’t get obsessed. For your own sake.” He looked at the picture of his daughter doing time in Rock Mountain.

  I called the Robin Hood and arranged to see him. He was young—they all are—maybe as young as twenty, operating out of a dingy apartment in Tribeca. I couldn’t judge his equipment: beyond basic literacy, computers are as alien to me as dancers. Like dancers, they concentrate on one aspect of the world, dismissing the rest.

  The Robin Hood furnished the usual proofs that he could tap into private databanks, that he could access government records, and that his translation programs could handle international airline d-bases. He promised a two-day turnaround. The price was astronomical by my standards, although probably negligible by his. I transferred the credits from my savings account, emptying it.

  I said, “You do know that the original Robin Hood transferred goods for free?”

  He said, not missing a beat, “The original Robin Hood didn’t have to pay for a Seidman-Nuwer encryptor.”

  I really hadn’t expected him to know who the original Robin Hood was.

  When I got home, Deborah had fallen asleep across her bed, still dressed in practice clothes. The toes of her tights were bloody. A new pair of toe shoes were shoved between the bedroom door and the door jamb; she softened the stiff boxes by slamming the door on them. There were three email messages for her from SAB, but I erased them all. I covere
d her, closed her door, and let her sleep.

  I met with the Robin Hood two days later. He handed me a sheaf of hardcopy. “The City Ballet injury records show two injuries for Caroline Olson in the last four years, which is as far back as the files are kept. One shin splint, one pulled ligament. Of course, if she had other injuries and saw a private doctor, that wouldn’t show up on their records, but if she did see one it wasn’t anybody on the City Ballet Recommended Physician List. I checked that.”

  “Two injuries? In four years?”

  “That’s what the record shows. These here are four-year records of City Ballet bioscans. All negative. Nobody shows any bioenhancement, not even Jennifer Lang. These are the City Ballet attendance figures over ten years, broken down by subscription and single-event tickets.”

  I was startled; the drop in attendance over the last two years was more dramatic than the press had ever indicated.

  “This one is Mrs. Anna Olson’s tax return for last year. All that income—all of it—is from investments and interests, and none of it is tied up in trusts or entails. She controls it all, and she can waste the whole thing if she wants to. You asked about unusual liquidation of stock in the last ten years: There wasn’t any. There’s no trust fund for Caroline Olson. This is Caroline’s tax return—only her salary with City Ballet, plus guest appearance fees. Hefty, but nothing like what the old lady controls.

  “This last is the air flight stuff you wanted: No flights on major commercial airlines out of the country for Caroline in the last six years, except when the City Ballet did its three international tours, and then Caroline flew pretty much with everybody else in the group. Of course if she did go to Rio or Copenhagen or Berlin, she could have gone by chartered plane or private jet. My guess is private jet. Those aren’t required to file passenger lists.”

  It wasn’t what I’d hoped to find. Or rather, it was half of what I’d hoped. No dancer is injured that seldom. It just doesn’t happen. I pictured Caroline Olson’s amazing extension, her breathtaking leaps; she reached almost the height expected of male superstars. And her crippled horror of a mother had huge amounts of money. “Caroline had a good run.”