by Nancy Kress
“—come together on this stage to make a singularly important announcement, in what well may be the singularly greatest gathering of scientific talent of all time,” Vanderbilt Grant said from the podium, in his rich mellifluous voice, with his rich mellifluous exaggerations. Or perhaps not.
I sat at the far end of the row of chairs, almost in the wings. Beside me sat Eric Kinder, of Whitehead Biological Institute, a trusted friend. Eric had done spectacular work on hormonal brain differences between infant identical twins—differences that could only have been caused by prenatal influences, most of them negative. We had corresponded extensively. He had been on my side for years. I could see the flesh of his neck working up and down over his collar as he gazed down the long row of his colleagues.
Margaret Futina, National Institute of Health Neuroscience Center, who had hard evidence of synthetic chemicals’ disruption of male Sertoli cells, those treasured producers of sperm. Her evidence had, somehow, never been published because, somehow, it “didn’t meet peer-review standards.”
Heinrich Feltz, Berlin Institute, who had done the most exhaustive study ever on the chemical contamination of breast milk, discovering 256 different synthetic chemicals—and then going on to do the first work on their interactions with each other inside the infant human body.
Wong Yue, Chinese People’s Academy of Science, who had perfected new methods of accurately measuring chemical concentrations in parts per trillion.
Marian Pearson, University of California at Irvine, who had used Murphy scanning to identify pinpoint brain malfunctions and cross-correlated them with selected chemical deposits in thyroid glands.
Albert Goldmann, University of Guelph, Canada, who had developed proof of falling sperm count due to endocrine disruption in mammals other than man.
Shoshona Ellinwood, Tufts University, whose work with pre-school children had found alarming nationwide increase in aggression and decrease in concentration—and correlated that with dose curves for synthetic pyrethoids.
Luigi Accorso, Medici Foundation of Rome, with research into how synthetic chemicals shut down human feedback mechanisms that were supposed to act as failsafes against endocrine-product overload.
Patrick James Sharpe, Harvard, whose research—much of it carried on against departmental opposition—linked selected synthetic disrupters to faulty manufacture of neurotransmitters in the brain.
“This illustrious gathering, this distinguished assembly,” Vanderbilt Grant went on, and no one in the huge audience could tell from his demeanor how much he hated doing this “—will address the premier medical crisis of our time: the terrifying fall in birth rate throughout the world. And we will do so not in the ineffective ways of previous conferences, but with a bold new direction: a concentrated attack on the bioaccumulation of synthetic chemicals that may be disrupting the human endocrine system.”
May be. Even now, Van was covering his ass. He stood at the podium, hands braced against it as if in a high wind, transfixing the cameras with the magnetic power that never left him. It hadn’t even left him in the luxurious cell in the Cunningham Federal Detention Center where Shana, Cameron, and I had told him our decision.
* * *
“You can’t, Nick! My God, do you have any idea of the economic results … consider. Consider carefully. Synthetic chemicals on your suspect list are found in everything, and I mean everything, produced and used in this country! Plastics, machine tooling, shampoos, fuels, food packaging, fertilizers, solvents.… The kind of serious government-sponsored scientific investigation you’re talking about would … you’ll get panic and hysteria over product use, massive changes in manufacturing requirements, bans and added costs. We can’t take it, Nick. The economy is fragile already—it could collapse. Not just falter—collapse.”
“And the current administration with it,” I said. “Including you. Yes, I know. But that’s the choice. If you let the real science get done—publicly and with establishment legitimacy—then Shana and Cameron and I will say nothing about the illegitimate branches of it you’re condoning to get the DNA research.”
“Yeah, that’s the price,” Shana brayed.
“That is our choice,” Cameron said quietly, and threaded his hands together, and looked at his own dance-toughened feet.
* * *
“From time immemorial,” Van intoned on stage, “what has been the first question of every civilization? It has been this: ‘How fare the children?’ When children flourish, so does the society. When children sicken and die, as they have in the great terrible plagues of history, the society loses heart and something in it also dies.
“That is where we stand now: not because our children are dying, but because they are not being born. Without the next generation, this one is lost, unanchored, sickened in that part of us most fully human. No society can flourish that cannot look its own future in its small faces, tuck its own future into bed at night, see its own future in the shine of innocent young eyes. And that is why no price is too great for any exploration of the human tragedy upon us. No price at all!”
* * *
“I don’t think you really know what you’re asking,” Van had said to me. “I don’t think you understand what taking on the manufacture of synthetic chemicals will actually mean. And there’s no hard evidence that it’s even the cause, Nick—you know that. A dozen competing theories—”
“That’s our choice,” Shana repeated, with satisfaction. She was a child, enjoying a child’s triumph—she, Shana Walders, was forcing the United States government to choose her way!
Van and I looked at each other. Old men, we both knew what was really happening here. There was no choice. If I had said, “No, Van, forget the bribes, we’re going public with the evil you’re covering up”—if I had said that, Shana and Cameron and I would never have left that prison. It might have been done quasi-legally: charges brought, no bail, matters of national security. Or it might have been done quasi-medically: psychosis-inducing drugs, one of us killed the other two, must never be set free, terrible tragedy, all recorded on camera. Or it might just have been done.
But from Van’s point of view, keeping what I knew away from the press wouldn’t have been easy anyway. Who else had I already told? Maggie, most certainly. What could he do about her? And who else? Van didn’t know. He studied my face, while Shana grinned like the innocent she didn’t think she was, and I saw him weighing the risk of silencing us against the risk of a government-backed exposé of the entire synthetic-chemical infrastructure of American materialism.
I saw the moment he decided.
After all, an expose is only the first step. Action must follow, and action takes a long time when findings are as opposed as this was going to be, by as many powerful economic forces. If history showed nothing else, it showed that. Even if the conference proved conclusively, beyond all doubt, that synthetic endocrine disrupters were leading to the extinction of the human race—even if we proved all that, changing it would take time. A very lot of time, By which point, Vanderbilt Grant would probably be dead anyway.
It’s the ultimate, perhaps the only, triumph of the old: we cannot be made to clean up the messes we leave behind.
“Okay, Nick,” Van said softly. “You got your conference.”
“Fucking right!” Shana cried.
* * *
“Over the next two years,” Van said in his thrilling voice, “this blue-ribbon panel will devote a hundred percent of its time and energy to investigating two vital things: What are the causes of the population crisis? And how can we reverse those causes at their roots? These scientists will test theories connected to natural body cycles, environmental effects upon those cycles, prenatal influences, and infant nurture. No stone will be left unturned—”
He actually used that phrase. It was a measure of Van’s tension. Usually he avoided both the trite and the comprehensive. His right hand, I saw by intense squinting, was in his pocket, where its trembling would not be recorded on vid.
“—in our search for answers. Practical answers that will make a practical difference. And this administration pledges its funding, to whatever extent is necessary, for those two full years. You have President Combes’s assurance of that, and my personal assurance as well.”
* * *
“I want some assurances, Van,” I said. “Here and now, on camera.”
Van nodded. Shana settled herself on a chair, looking expectant. Cameron continued to gaze at his bare feet. For the first time, I noticed the pattern of sweat stains and depressions in the carpet of the cell. Barefoot, he had been dancing.
Van said, “What do you want?”
I said, “Anonymity for Cameron, complete and total.”
Van snapped, “He would already have that if it hadn’t been for your girl here.”
“Acceptance into the army for Shana. With your personal written guarantee of no harassment or special scrutiny of her.”
“Yes.” He said it as if it physically hurt.
“Reinstatement at the CDC for my daughter Sallie.”
“Certainly. I already told you that was a mistake.”
More than that was a mistake. I didn’t say it. “Complete autonomy for the scientific conference: in invitations, procedures, televisation, conclusions, and publications.”
“Yes.”
“Government funding, at the Class Three level or better for two years”
“Yes.”
“Complete autonomy in choosing the panel members.”
“But if you … oh, all right. Yes.”
“Public acknowledgement, government security, and presidential endorsement of our findings.”
“Nick, you know I can’t—”
“Then at least you sponsor their presentation to the President. You, personally, as FDA head. And to Congress as well.”
“I reserve the right to have others present contradictory findings at the same time. After all, there are always multiple ways to interpret data.”
He would allow equal time to the manufacturing corporations, pharmaceutical companies, agricombines, everyone who used synthetic disrupters—which was indeed everyone, Van was right about that. Equal time even if the corporation-sponsored “findings” were misleading or bogus. But I knew I couldn’t budge him on this; it was the way science itself worked. You were supposed to keep an open mind and consider all possibilities.
“Agreed,” I said.
“Hey, Nick,” Shana said, “Maybe you should lie down. You look wiped out.”
She was right; I was exhausted. My neck throbbed. The base of my spine felt like old paper, crumbly and fragile. I needed to save my strength. Only I knew how much more it was going to be needed for.
* * *
“So I count it as a privilege to welcome this distinguished panel of scientists to Washington,” Van said. From the back of the room a robocam detached itself and floated high over the stage for an aerial shot. “Speaking for this administration, we are sure that their work will make a tremendous difference to us all. That work represents an open-ended synergy of many different disciplines and theories. And we are pledged to receive their theories and recommendations in the same open-minded manner in which I know they will offer it.”
Here it came. Open-ended. Open-minded. Theories. All the buzzwords for “not conclusively proven.” So that later, when the synthetics manufacturers offered their own theories that exonerated their products, Van could also champion them—if the wind blew that way.
As of course it would.
No matter. The conference would bring the issues into the open, would provide a solid scientific and moral foundation for the political fights to come. These scientists would do what they could to aid the side of objective truth.
Next Van introduced each panel member, who stood to receive applause. The scientists looked slightly abashed; they were not used to this kind of attention. And they had an innate respect for the order of things: first you did the work, then you received the attention. They weren’t comfortable with the fact that the press usually did it the other way around.
“Finally,” said Van, “I’d like to introduce the conference chair, Dr. Nicholas Clementi.”
It was time.
“Dr. Clementi has a long and distinguished record, both as scientific researcher and as advisor to the legislative process. Most recently, he serves on the Congressional Advisors Committee for Medical Crises. Please join with me in welcoming the head of the Special Presidential Task Force on Bioaccumulation, Dr. Nicholas Clementi.”
I rose. Van greeted me at the podium, taking both my hands warmly in his. I could feel the tremor in his right fingers. He had been fiercely opposed to letting me make a personal statement. “Premature,” he’d said. Eric Kinder, when I had talked to him during the planning of the press release, had pointed out that I was unlikely to cloak the panel purpose in the same softened euphemisms that Van favored. Maggie had said Van just didn’t want to share the spotlight. Sallie had said he needed to keep the press conference as short as possible; he was sicker than most people thought.
Whatever his reason, he was about to be proved right. He should not have let me speak.
If you would not be forgotten,
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin, the master of cunning and double-dealing.
I moved behind the podium and waited until Van had eased himself onto my chair, at the end of the row. The lights made a nimbus, obscuring any glimpse of the faces I couldn’t have seen clearly anyway. Among them I imagined Shana, second row center, tensed in readiness.
“Thank you,” I said. “I am honored to head this conference, which I regard as the most important thus far in our young century. The damage done by bioaccumulation of synthetic endocrine disrupters is an unimaginable enormity. Beside it, both human fumblings with DNA and human triumphs over cancer and heart disease look puny. If we have no children, then it hardly matters whether or not we alter our genetic heritage, or conquer our inherited diseases. Without identifying and correcting the population crisis, we have no future. Even if, as I firmly believe, the direct cause of that crisis is our promiscuous use of synthetic chemicals, plastics, and alloys.
“For generations, we have trusted that each new wave of science will correct the problems created by the wave before it. And to some extent, that has happened. Toxic wastes were corrected by toxin-eating bacteria. Environmental cancer can be cured by tissue-isolation techniques. World hunger has been greatly eased by laboratory-enhanced crops.
“However—letting technology cure the problems that technology created is not happening now. No profitable scientific spin-offs have appeared to increase the dangerously falling birth rate—and the host of other endocrine-related problems accompanying it. So we will have to set aside our wish that new technology might always obliterate old consequences. We will have to act directly upon root causes. We owe our children, and our children’s children, that much.”
I tightened my grip on the podium and allowed myself, for only a second, to close my eyes. This was it.
Et tu, Brute—
“And we owe our children something else, too. The future that this conference is designed to save will only have value if it offers those who come after us not just life, but a life worth having. Dr. Grant spoke a few minutes ago about ‘the first question of every civilization: “How fare the children?”’ When its children don’t flourish, Dr. Grant reminded us, a society loses heart and something in it also dies.
“But ‘flourish’ means more than simply to be alive and functioning. To flourish, children need a society that values truth, justice, and honor. So do adults. And nowhere do we need that more than in our government—because history has shown well that when the government passes a Tipping Point of corruption, the society itself cannot long endure.”
I didn’t turn around, but I knew what must be
happening behind me. Van rising from his chair; Eric Kinder pulling him firmly back down, half in the shadow at the edge of the press lights.
“Ladies and gentlemen, listen to me. Please. We are at that biological Tipping Point.”
If Van struggled, Eric would quietly force him offstage. Two large men waited unobtrusively to escort him through one of the capital’s Tipping Point tunnels to a distant parking lot. Vanderbilt Grant would be excused from the rest of the news conference on the grounds of ill health. Everyone in the audience would understand. So many of them were old themselves.
I said, with as much intensity as I could get into my voice, “Your government has consistently lied to you about its DNA-level scientific research. Worse, it has condoned evil—actual evil—in order to get around the regulations which it has cynically passed and to which it has cynically paid lip service for the gaining of votes.”
Behind me the scientists, of whom only Eric Kinder had been aware that this was coming, exclaimed in several languages. The audience buzzed. A few people, blurs haloed by the glaring lights, rose to their feet, startled or angry or voracious. Reporters started to shout out questions. One man materialized at the base of my podium and tried to climb on stage. Security hustled him away.
“Illegal genetic-engineering labs have experimented with both vivifacture and DNA research.” I had to raise my voice to make it heard over the din; my throat ached. “That is not new knowledge to some of us. What is new is that top government officials—clear up to Vanderbilt Grant and perhaps higher—have knowingly allowed kidnapping, torture, and organ harvesting from innocent people so that this research could go on. They knew it, and didn’t allow it to be stopped! And I can prove it!”
Reporters crowded the edge of the stage, all shouting. I held up my hand, both to quiet them and because I couldn’t talk much more. Just three more sentences.