by Nancy Kress
“How should I know? I let myself in.” He poured himself another bourbon from the sideboard. “Aren’t you even going to ask why I’m here at this hour?”
It was 2:30 in the afternoon. “Certainly. Just let me get myself settled.… Can I get you anything?”
“I’m fine.”
I put away my walking stick and poured myself a scotch. Maggie had filled the fireplace opening with a basket of roses and heliotrope, and the heavy scent floated on the warm air. I settled myself in the wing chair opposite John. He waited, moody.
“Now, then. What can I do for you, John?”
“You can’t do anything for me,” he said, ready to be irritated. “Every time I come and visit it isn’t because I want you to do something for me.”
“All right,” I said evenly. “Then, how are you?”
“Smeared.” John was thirty-six, but he used the slang of current adolescents. Perhaps this came from staying, in essence, the youngest generation. He and his wife, like so many others, were childless. John was among the eighty-plus percent of males whose sperm count was below five million per milliliter of semen: he was functionally sterile. A hundred years ago, young men of John’s age averaged over a hundred million sperm per milliliter. His and Laurie’s tries at in vitro had not taken.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “Why are you ‘smeared’?”
“I’ve been fired again.”
He said this almost with sullen satisfaction: see, the world is against me, I told you so. I said, “How did that come about?”
“How should I know? I’m the fired one, not the firer. They just called this morning and said my telecommuting access was terminated.” He sipped his bourbon.
He was still handsome. Or would be if it weren’t for a certain puffiness, less physical than postural. His face sagged, his mouth sneered, his body slumped.
I said carefully, “What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? Look for another job. Laurie and I need the money.”
He wouldn’t have any trouble finding another job: there weren’t enough workers to create everything needed by the huge population of old people. Poor old people supported—minimally—by taxes. Rich old people who hadn’t yet passed on their money to their children, who therefore were doubly in need. That was what the last part of John’s statement referred to. I ignored it.
“How is Laurie?”
“Fine.” He actually smiled. John’s wife was a treasure, a miracle, and sometimes the only way I could find to appreciate my son was that he had the good sense to appreciate Laurie. Maggie and I hoped desperately that she would never leave him.
I said, “Aren’t you two supposed to come for dinner tomorrow night? Sallie and Richard will be up from Atlanta.”
His smile vanished. “I don’t know if I’ll be up to a family party. You don’t seem to realize, Dad, how tough it is to be laid off again. You never had to worry about that, of course.”
Meaning, you the successful scientist and over-achiever who haven’t had the economic struggle I have. There was enough truth in this whining implication to keep me quiet. My generation didn’t carry a huge demographic bulge on our backs. On the other hand, being fired—which, I noticed, had now become “laid off” in John’s mind—was a lot more common to my generation than his. I didn’t say this.
I changed the subject. “Sallie will be sorry to miss you.”
“I doubt it.” John didn’t like his older sister. Jealousy, perhaps. Sallie had always been a success: outstanding student, happy wife, respected senior researcher at the CDC. And never having wanted kids, she wasn’t disappointed at not having them.
“Well, I better be going,” John said gloomily. “I should be on the net, trying for some sort of job. Listen, tell Mom about the lay-off, will you? I just can’t face another round of ‘John-the-irresponsible.’”
Then become responsible, I wanted to say. Complete your job duties, pay attention to your superiors, don’t lie to cover up your mistakes. It was usually the lying that did John in. Maggie, the most ethical person I’ve ever known, was driven wild by John’s lying. I retreated from conflict with John. Maggie had never retreated in her life.
“I’ll tell her,” I said. “Think again about tomorrow night, John. Laurie always seems to enjoy coming here.”
“Yeah.” But no smile this time. “Of course, I know it’s Laurie you want to see and not me.”
“No, it’s both of you,” I said evenly. “Good luck with the job search.”
“Sure.”
He left, having never asked about my cane or unsteady walk or drooping right eye. I poured myself the second drink forbidden by my doctor but required by the situation.
Here is one of the hardest sentences for a parent to ever think: I don’t like my child.
Be fair, Maggie’s voice said in my head. He and Laurie want a baby so much … the strain must be enormous.
Yes, I could grant that. Although I suspected the strain was mostly on Laurie, not John. There are women in whom the desire to nourish and love a child is more than desire: it’s a biological hunger. John, it sometimes seemed to me, was less interested in becoming a father than in feeling victimized because he wasn’t. A year or so ago, he’d “accidentally” emailed me an entry from his diary files:
My father, Dr. Nicholas Clementi, claims descent from Muzio Clementi, the incredibly popular contemporary of Mozart. Clementi was the keyboard virtuoso of his day. He influenced Hayden and Beethoven and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Today Clementi is forgotten; Mozart is a legend. My father’s claim is supposed to show that he is wryly modest about his own staggering professional reputation. Sic transit gloria mundi, even a gloria anchored by microbiology. It’s as if he assumes that age must be accompanied by mystical, detached wisdom, and so if he has age, he must also have the other and is obliged to display it. And he does. My father is wise all over the place.
I, on the other hand, never mention Muzio Clementi. If you’re not going to have any descendants to carry on your name, why care who brought it to you?
I wandered around the living room, touching Maggie’s bibelots. A brass urn, a table sculpture, a candy bowl, a framed picture of our mountain cabin. I needed to distract myself. But I couldn’t seem to concentrate on my scientific journals, or even on the TV, which gave me a program about “the so-called problem of endocrine disrupters leaching from household plastics.” The problem, said a handsome actor in a white lab coat, was imaginary, supposedly derived from a few badly designed studies. The public should be reassured by the heroic watchdog activities of the FDA, by the even worse problems we would have without household plastics, and by the much-better-designed studies he would quote now. Both studies and program, I noted, had been made possible by “a generous grant from the American Plastics Foundation.”
I was grateful when the house system interrupted. “Dr. Clementi, you have an incoming vidcall.”
I took it on my wrister. A computer voice announced, “This call originates from Prince Georges County Correctional Facility,” and then she came on, a tiny image looking disheveled and furious.
“Dr. Clementi? This is Shana Walders. I’m calling from jail.”
“Yes, Private Walders.”
That acceptance seemed to disconcert her. “Well, they arrested me! And I think you got an obligation to help me!”
“And why is that? Because I’m the one responsible for your arrest?” More victimization. More John.
She scowled fiercely. “Well, no, I guess I did that.”
I sat up straighter. “House, transfer this call back to your system, please.” It did, and Shana Walders’s face appeared, much larger, on my wall screen. Her golden hair was a tangled mess, and there was a bruise on her left cheek. Resisting arrest, I would guess.
She said, “I’m responsible for getting myself arrested, but you’re responsible for me not getting into the army. That Congress hearing! So I think you should help me now.” Pause. “Please.”
“I don’t see why I should—”
“They’re only letting me have this one phone call!” she said, and started to cry. Suddenly she looked very young and very defenseless.
“Private Walders, I am not moved by tears,” I said austerely, and instantly the tears vanished. She was versatile. “However, I can be reached by logic. Why don’t you calmly explain to me just what has happened.”
“All right. I found the boy whose face was on those stupid monkeys.”
I hadn’t expected to hear that. “And how did you accomplish this?”
She explained the entire brainless sequence, starting with the girls’ attack on the young men. That sort of stupid bigotry in itself was enough to disgust me, but then much of the current political climate disgusted me. I listened quietly, through her search for the right dancer, her ill-planned trespass in the International Center, her arrest.
“Private Walders, did the authorities use a truth drug?”
“Of course. I said they could. I don’t have nothing to hide here!”
Shana Walders’s image glared at me ferociously. Clearly, they hadn’t progressed to any of the other drugs used to control prisoners in a system so short of cash that often only two guards ran an entire prison shift. She was so ferocious, so vivid, so prepared to fight hard for whatever she thought she wanted.
So unlike John.
“All right,” I said, “against my better judgment, I’ll come down and bail you out. At least until I can check out your story.”
“Thank you!” she said, and smiled up through suddenly lowered, suddenly dewy lashes. It was like the sun rising. Surely she wasn’t stupid enough to try sexual wiles on me? Maggie would be amused.
“Don’t slug anyone else until I get there,” I said, and rose slowly to retrieve my walking stick.
* * *
“Where do you live?” I said to Shana, leaning on my stick outside the county jail, which was being used for the considerable overflow from D.C. itself. Bail had, of course, been nominal. The system needed to keep inside as few people as possible, and unless they had actually maimed someone, eighteen-year-olds were treated indulgently. They’re a precious national resource, as the ad campaigns endlessly remind us. In actuality, the ubiquitous holosigns of Project Patriot exist not to remind us oldsters, who know full well how dependent we are on the young working force, but to remind the young of their obligations to us. Through flattery, through community, through anything that might work, YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
“I don’t live no place,” Shana said. “I’m pretty much out of money.” She looked at me expectantly, and moved closer.
“Private Walders, let us get have one thing perfectly understood between us. I’m old enough to be your grandfather. Possibly your great-grandfather. I’m also married, very happily. If I’ve interested myself in your story, it’s because your story interests me, not your body.”
She stared at me in complete disbelief. And then smiled, shaking her head. “Oh, sure, right.”
What had this child’s life been like? Never mind; I could guess. Love at first sight is vague until/ Gold’s tinkling makes him audible.… Rosetti. But Shana was versatile. She moved away from me—I had the definite impression she considered this only temporary—and turned brisk. “Okay, what else can I tell you about my story? And can I tell it to you at your place, so I’m not out on the street? I’m too old for Child Protection.”
They’d take her in anyway. Nobody refused to help a youngster. Including, apparently, me. “Yes, you may stay with my wife and me. That way I can make sure you don’t jump bail.”
She smiled at the thought that I could make her do anything, and followed my careful walk toward the train. “You need help?”
“No.” And then, “Thank you.”
She nodded, and slowed her pace to mine, and all of a sudden I was aware how sweet it was to have a youngster walking beside me, trustfully depending on me. This was how it had felt when Sallie and Alana and John were young. To a child, daddy was a superman. If Alana and her little family hadn’t emigrated to Mars … if Sallie or John had given us grandchildren …
“Watch that curb,” Shana said, and took my arm. I watched the older old people around me in mid-afternoon, people with no place in particular to go. A woman feeding pigeons. Two men playing backgammon on a safely monitored bench. On a low foamcast wall someone had spray-painted GEEZERS DIE AND LET US FREE! Nobody looked directly at the graffiti. Instead they shot me sideways glances, me with my beautiful granddaughter, one of the lucky few, why me and not them? I didn’t meet their eyes.
Our progress was slow. My headache had returned, despite the massive dose of painkillers I’d prescribed myself along with the antifungal drugs. The drugs retarded the growth of the mucormycosis, but hadn’t been able to eradicate it completely. Mucor was like that. Stubborn and persistent as Shana Walders. It was growing through the nerves connected to my brain.
“Look at that,” Shana said, and pointed with the hand not holding me up. Across the street, a child of about eight had spotted a rat behind some garbage cans. The little boy approached it curiously. His bodyguard, a huge burly woman in uniform, grabbed the child’s hand and led him away from the trash. Immediately the child threw himself to the ground and began screaming, fighting to break the woman’s grip, kicking his heels on the dirty pavement. The rat, unalarmed, watched from behind a trash bin, baring its teeth.
Shana said, “If that kid was mine, I’d whack him so hard his head wouldn’t stop ringing for a week. He’s too old for that shit. Look at him!”
I could feel my right eye droop again. I said wearily, “Diminished tolerance for frustration. Or a learning disability. Or perhaps just considerably increased aggression, like the rat. All the result of increased hormone disrupters.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it.” Like everybody else.
“I’m not stupid,” the girl said angrily. But I was too tired, too muffled in pain, to answer her. Too busy dying.
None of that. No self-pity. Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Shakespeare.
We waited, Shana and I, for a cab.
* * *
Maggie eyed Shana warily. “Are you willing to give me your personal code to your citizen’s file?”
“So you can look up my police record?”
“Exactly,” Maggie said. They looked at each other, Shana in very short yellow shorts and garish one-shouldered sweater, her hair a golden tangle; Maggie in a simple, expensive dress the same soft white as her pretty curls. Separated by more than half a century, they wore identical expressions: smiling, hostile, determined. I moved out from between them and lowered myself to the sofa. When she’d first entered my living room, Shana had looked around with fake, hungry disdain, taking in the sculptures, the old-fashioned books, paintings, carved moldings, deeply lacquered walls. Maggie didn’t like wall programming. Our house was traditional, serene, and in it Shana Walders looked like a misprojected pornographic holo.
She said, “And if I don’t give you my personal code, I’m out on the street?”
“You are.”
“Then I don’t got much choice, do I?”
“Certainly you do. Give me the code or don’t give me the code. Whine about each choice having consequences, or don’t whine.”
Shana flushed. She didn’t like being accused of whining. “XDG609K327!”
“Thank you,” Maggie said, and left the room.
Shana said grudgingly, “That’s one tough old mare.”
“Tougher than I am,” I said, and the girl laughed. When she threw back her head, the strong white column of her throat shone. I saw why she expected slavishness from men. Only God, my dear, / Could love you for yourself alone / And not your yellow hair. If I were twenty years younger … no, not even then. She was a lethal gene just waiting for expression.
Maggie returned. “Juvenile records sealed, and in the l
ast year she’s been in Service. What’s in the sealed juvies, dear?”
“Two burglaries, one assault.”
“Details?”
“The assault was a bar fight on a girl who got too friendly with a man I was fucking. The burglaries were jewelry from houses pretty much like this one.”
I was appalled. I hadn’t expected all this. But Maggie only said, “I see. Juvenile house restraint?”
“Suspended sentences.” Shana smiled. “I’m a precious natural resource.”
“And an unethical shit,” Maggie said cheerfully. “However, your retina scan is now on file. If anything turns up missing from this house, you’d be very easy to track. And you’re no longer a juvenile. Adult sentences are no fun.” Crime is rarer now—old people tend to behave—but sentences are heavier. Personal responsibility.
“How do you know,” Shana said, “that I won’t just murder you both in your beds?”
“Because you’re not a damn fool,” Maggie said. “Just remember, dear, that I’m not, either. Nick, what’s wrong with your eye?”
“Nothing,” I lied. I could see she didn’t believe me, but she wouldn’t make an issue of it in front of Shana. Soon I would have to tell Maggie about the mucormycosis. Soon.
“Then,” she said, “I’ll just see about dinner.” And she left Shana and me alone to talk.
“Well, I’m glad she wasn’t my sergeant,” Shana said sullenly. “So what do we do now?”
I’d been thinking about that. Vivifacturing could, in theory, duplicate a living face and graft it over a bone-altered chimp’s. But it would require polymer scaffolds of great complexity upon which to grow various kinds of cells from their originals. The scaffolds are computer-constructed from MOSSs—Multi-layer Organ-Structure Scans. To obtain a MOSS of that detail, the subject—or, in this case, his head and hands—must have spent hours inside a MOSS tank. Also, cell sampling would take a long while; you’d need to obtain several hundred different prototypes, from blood vessels to fat cells. And, of course, the use the prototypes had been put to was wildly illegal, even though it didn’t actually tamper with human DNA. After that prohibition, the second genetic commandment was “Thou shalt not pollute the human form by crossing it with animals.”