Judith didn't like the sound of direwolf, but apparently Miriam did. "Oh, okay," her daughter said, with an obvious pretense of reluctance.
Nabuko ushered them into the dimly-lit viewing room and told the system to call up catalog number three. Images of perhaps a dozen dog-related genmods materialized in the center of the room, rotating slowly, while a list appeared on the flat screen behind them. The first column consisted of a combination of letters and numbers, the second a short description ("miniature Great Dane"), and the third a price in corporate units.
Judith felt like someone had socked her in the gut.
She stared at the screen, breathing deeply and feeling her mind go dead again. It looked like the catalog she had found on Vance's desk — too much.
Had she found a catalog of clones?
"Do any of these items look interesting to you?" Nabuko was asking her children.
"The glow-in-the-dark husky!" Luther cried.
The saleswoman obligingly called up the husky, and a single image replaced that of the previous assortment. Judith gazed at the modified dog as it went from snow white to fluorescent green, Nabuko's sales pitch flowing over her like so much verbal garbage, incomprehensible.
Cloning humans was illegal, but everyone knew the corporations had their own laws, and they had to do with profit. No one ever talked about what the corporations did outside the law — they were too powerful, and people owed them too much, their clean streets, their safety.
If the catalog she'd found on Vance's desk was a catalog of clones, it would explain why it had no address — prostitution was semi-legal, after all, while cloning humans was not.
Judith clenched her fists in her lap to keep the trembling from taking over again, grateful for the dim lighting of the viewing room. She barely registered the way her children argued over the merits of direwolves and fluorescent huskies, barely noticed as another catalog was called up containing the dreaded miniature mammoth.
When the children's argument began to get more vocal, she shook herself out of her fog.
"If you two are going to be this way about it, there may be no pet for you at all."
A chorus of "mom!" went up, and Nabuko gave her an imitation of an understanding smile as the lights came back on.
Judith rose. "We don't have to make this decision today. We can talk about it at home, and then we can get back to Nabuko."
The saleswoman nodded. "Certainly."
They shook hands and left the building, Judith impatient now. Luckily, the rain had stopped; she absolutely had to talk to Helen again, somewhere public enough for privacy, where the kids would be busy.
She called Helen's number at work on her wrist unit as they made their way out to the car. "Hi, Helen. Do you feel like meeting me and the kids at the zoo when you get off work?"
There was a brief pause at the other end of the line. "Sure. Things are fairly slow today. I shouldn't be much longer."
"Great. The kids love the monkeys. We'll meet you at the primate exhibit, okay?"
"Okay."
Judith lowered her wrist, feeling a flood of relief. She wasn't in this alone.
* * * *
"So you think the catalog is human clones?" Helen asked in an undertone as they paced next to mandrills swinging high in the trees. Miriam and Luther had their faces pressed to the glass, exclaiming at the blue and red striped faces and laughing at their colorful bottoms.
Judith leaned closer to her friend, even though there was no one near. Everyone else was watching the antics of the monkeys. "The catalog they showed me at Chrysalis looked just like the one I gave you. Besides, why would a whorehouse have a catalog?"
Helen shook her head. "Come on, Judith, why not? There are catalogs for men who want to buy themselves a wife. Why not catalogs for men who want to buy themselves a whore?"
She could tell by the tone of her friend's voice that Helen thought she was naive. Well, maybe Helen was right. Obviously she was right. Judith's face began to grow hot again and she looked away. "It wasn't just that, Helen. The format of the catalog was almost exactly the same."
Helen linked her arm through Judith's. "If you're right, then this is way too big for the two of us."
"Don't you have friends?" Judith murmured.
"Yes, I do. And I intend to tell them what you found." She was silent for a moment, watching Miriam and Luther running from exhibit to exhibit. She turned back to Judith. "But you have a husband, and you need to confront him."
Judith couldn't hold her gaze and glanced over at the rainforest exhibit. She'd spent hours there trying to get a feel for her environment for Chrysalis. "I need to find out first what the catalog really is."
"You also need to find out what he's doing with it, and you can only do that if you talk to him."
Judith wiped a stray tear from the corner of one eye with her knuckle. She hated what this had done to her, didn't know where the self-possessed woman she considered herself had gone. The summer sun was warm on her back, and she was miserable. "You're right. I can't keep putting this off. I'll talk to him when he gets back from Seattle tomorrow."
"And I will look into it," Helen assured her. "Maybe someone has heard some rumors."
She nodded, watching her children laugh at the grimaces of a human-faced Francois Langur monkey. Helen took her hand and squeezed.
As always, she couldn't get the kids away from the zoo until closing time. When she drove up to their house, she noted with a start of apprehension that Vance's car was already parked in the driveway. She wasn't going to have an extra day to prepare herself mentally after all.
"Daddy, daddy!" the kids yelled as they tumbled out of the car and into the house. Judith followed more slowly, then turned in the direction of her studio. To her surprise, she saw Vance coming out. He faced her, his expression pure guilty shock until he composed his features again.
"You're home early," Judith said, keeping her voice light. Any moment, the kids would descend upon them after they didn't find their father anywhere else.
"I forgot something, so we cut off the meeting. I'll have to go to Seattle again next week."
"You forgot something in my studio?"
He shook his head. "No. I just thought if I have to go again I could take a demo of your work, in case Hypersystems is interested in commissioning something."
She strode past him through the door to the desk next to her system and pulled open the top drawer.
"Here," she said, handing him a cube. "Judith Hamnett, holo artist," stood in bold letters on the cover.
Vance took the drive. "I don't know how I could have missed it."
"Daddy!" Miriam plowed into her father, Luther right behind. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to accept the lies he offered. But Helen was right, and she knew it.
"Vance, we need to talk."
He looked at her and blinked, once. Then he nodded slowly while the kids clambered all over him, demanding his attention.
Judith couldn't understand how it had come to this.
* * * *
The hours until Luther and Miriam were finally settled in for the night drew out forever. She let Vance put them in bed, waiting in the living room, her brain fuzzy and her heart tight.
"I know what you were looking for," she said without preamble when he joined her.
Vance scrunched his eyes closed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I'm sorry you had to see that."
"And that's all you're sorry for?"
He stared at her for a moment without answering. "I think I have to show you something."
Of all the answers she had imagined hearing from him, that one didn't even come close. "I've already seen your catalog. Isn't that enough?"
"Unfortunately, it isn't. I can't pull one of those lines like 'this isn't how it looks' unless I show you how it really looks." He reached his hand down to her.
Judith gazed at it, unmoving. "With no explanation?"
Vance gave an impatient shrug. "Yes, it is a catalog,
and no, I have never ordered anything from it. I do the selling. Will you come now?"
At his words, she drew in a sharp breath and then took his hand, like in a dream. How could she have possibly been so full of herself to believe things couldn't get worse?
Her husband didn't buy women, he just sold them.
Still in the same dream, she watched as he set the house for babysitter mode, and followed him out to his armored car, silent.
They drove out into the night, making their way to one of the guarded gates of their corporate zone, leaving the protected area and heading south on I-5. Before they reached the Tualatin zone, they turned off the freeway, away from the walls and lights and security forces, and headed west.
"Aren't you finally going to ask me where we're going?" Vance asked.
"We're going to wherever it is that you sell women," Judith said, surprised at how steady her voice was.
In the dim light of headlights between the trees, she could see him shake his head. "Not women."
She'd been right. "Are you saying clones aren't women?"
"Not these clones. They're genmods."
"Oh my God."
"You've damned me already, haven't you, Ju?"
"Yes."
"Hasn't it even occurred to you to ask yourself how I got mixed up in this?"
"No."
"Fifteen years together and you don't have anything more to offer than that."
"I was thinking the same thing."
Vance gave an uncharacteristic snort. "Get down on the floor. I don't have any excuse for you being here."
Judith kneeled behind the dashboard as Vance slowed the car and turned into a bumpy driveway, gravel from the sound of it. The car stopped, and Vance pushed the button to roll down the window.
"Evening, Mr. Hamnett," she heard from outside the vehicle. "Go right on in."
The car started up again, and Vance continued a ways across the gravel until he stopped and killed the lights. "Okay, you can get up."
Judith pulled herself back up on her seat, her knees hurting from the bumpy ride across the parking lot. Ahead of them rose what looked like a warehouse, the walls pale, unadorned, windowless.
"What kind of genmods?" Judith asked quietly while they waited for whatever it was her husband wanted her to see.
"Modified chimpanzees, as far as I know, manipulated and designed to look like humans," he said, staring out of the window. "I didn't listen very closely when they tried to explain it to me."
"But the customers ..." Judith couldn't continue the thought out loud.
"Don't they care that they're fucking monkeys, is that what you're trying to ask me?"
Judith blinked. Vance never swore. She nodded.
He turned to look at the walls of the building across the parking lot. "Why should they care as long as it looks like a dream come true and squeals the way they want it to?"
The bitterness in his voice finally penetrated the fog in her brain. "Why are you doing this?"
"They offered it to me, Ju. They offered it to me."
"Who?"
"Hadn't you guessed that yet? Chrysalis, who else?"
As he spoke, a door she hadn't even noticed opened on the far left side of the building, and a tall man in a suit emerged, his hand firmly on the elbow of what looked like a boy of twelve or thirteen.
Yet again, Judith felt as if someone had socked her in the stomach. "Jesus fucking Christ."
"Depends on who's Jesus and who's Christ," Vance said, in that bitterly humorous tone of voice she had never heard before this evening.
Together they watched as the suit carted off his pet, and Judith could feel spontaneous, unbidden tears coursing down her cheeks. "But why didn't you turn them down?"
"Don't you understand? It's not an offer you can refuse. It's one of the corporations, Ju — the ones who keep us safe, the ones who run our lives. And by offering me this lucrative business, they made me complicit."
She attempted to wipe the tears away, but they wouldn't stop. "You could have gone to the authorities."
"Exactly. That's why I didn't have the choice of turning it down."
Finally, finally, Judith began to understand. An offer he couldn't refuse.
When Judith didn't respond, Vance continued, almost to himself. "You see, I have such good business contacts with so many corporations, so many people in high places; I offer the luxury goods to those who can afford to pay for them, and those are precisely the customers Chrysalis wanted to reach. It made the perfect fence."
The tears were soaking her shirt now, but she had given up on trying to wipe them away.
Vance ran a hand through his curly hair. "I try to tell myself that for every genmod clone produced, that's one less woman or child kept out of the illegal slavery ring." His voice dropped a notch. "But I still have to sell them."
They sat there in the dark and the silence. Judith didn't know what to say.
Vance sighed. "I have to go in to give them an excuse for why I'm here. You'd better get down again."
She nodded and slipped down next to the seat, her back against the door. The metal was cold through the linen of her shirt. The opposite door opened and slammed shut, and Judith was left with her fear and her thoughts, neither good company.
She wiped the sleeve of her shirt across her face and leaned her head against the door. Faint light from the moon and the stars seeped through to where she sat, her butt on the rough carpet.
Would he come out here now with Chrysalis security forces and gun her down? She didn't think so. Whatever Vance had done, it had at least in part been for her and the children. But she didn't know for sure. Everything that had happened in the last couple of days was so completely outside of the realm of her experience and expectations, even her own murder didn't seem like such a distant prospect.
What would she have done if she had been in his place? If she had known there was a potential threat to Miriam and Luther? What?
She desperately wanted to call Helen, but she didn't know what kind of tracing equipment this facility had. And so she waited, surrounded by near-silence and her own busy thoughts. At one point she heard what she thought was the whimpering of a child. How could it whimper if it wasn't human? And how could it look so human if it was a chimp?
They could do so much with genetic modification these days. The real question was, if they truly had done so much, where was the boundary between human and non-human? And did it really matter?
Judith shook her head, as if she could clear her thoughts. But she knew she couldn't. Oh, why did she have to find out about this? And why was she the one who had to do something about it?
* * * *
The big butterfly drifted lazily between the chairs of the dinner guests, a perfect illusion. Judith watched from the table where she sat with Vance, watched the smiles on the faces of the other diners as it winged it's way to and through them. First the male Queen Alexandra's Birdwing, with its pale blue and green and iridescent yellow markings against a black background, an impressive example of what the world had lost and what (the message was) only Chrysalis Biotechnics could bring back. Following the male was the larger female, more drab perhaps, but with a wingspan so wide, nearly a foot, the diners it passed gasped in surprise, blinked, and laughed.
Judith smiled faintly to herself. She had only exaggerated the size by perhaps an inch.
Chrysalis was celebrating itself, celebrating its success, and Vance and Judith were a part of that. Even if it meant they would never sleep well again at night.
Around the edges of the room, behind the forest of illusory ferns and gingkoes and cycads, other extinct species lurked, here a hyaenodon with it's vicious teeth; there a massetognathus like a big, skinny rat, and watching it carefully, a dog-like direwolf; all part of an anachronistic conglomeration, a fantastical celebration of the weird and wild things the need to survive had come up with over the eons. Despite herself, despite the mood she was in, Judith couldn't help being proud of her work.
It was a monumental environment, green and luxurious, serene and dangerous and mysterious.
The female butterfly made its way to a pipe vine plant and laid its eggs while a number of diners watched. The first egg hatched, and a caterpillar emerged, eating its way through the leaves. Judith played with the food on her plate while she waited. She wasn't hungry.
On the leaves of the plants in the holographic jungle surrounding them, a myriad of caterpillars spun themselves into cocoons, chrysalis upon chrysalis. The first to emerge were more Queen Alexandra's Birdwings, but soon other extinct species slipped out of the cocoons, pteranodons and hipparions and even a woolly mammoth. Then came the fantasy creatures: a pegasus, a chimera, a dragon.
Then came the moment Judith had been waiting for.
The first chimp emerged from a cocoon, and she heaved a sigh of something a little like relief. She'd pulled off the switch in the environments.
The chimp began to climb the nearest tree, but then it's prehensile feet grew stiff and it slipped down. Its back became straighter, its head more elongated, the hair melted from its body, and it became a she. A very naked she. Very much like the small-breasted Asian beauty Judith had first seen only a few days earlier.
She heard the murmurs growing at the tables near where the first chimp had appeared, watched the way they stared when two business-suited holos of humans appeared out of the trees, watched as one gave the other a bundle of outmoded cash and took possession of the former chimp, slipped a leash around her long neck, and led her away with a leer.
The next chrysalis to emerge as a chimp transformed into the little boy Judith had seen in the parking lot in the burbs. As he too was led away on a leash, a woman at the nearest table stood up with a gasp, clapping her hand to her mouth, her eyes wide. A number of heads turned in the woman's direction, just in time to watch a little girl who had once been a chimp meet the same fate.
"What's going on?" Vance asked and turned around in his chair — to see a chimp transform into the blond bimbo of the catalog.
The Future, Imperfect: Short Stories Page 12