by Greg Bear
“I am not just their mother,” Jane said.
“Jane and I believe there is a certain plan in nature, a plan we shouldn’t interfere with. If we had gone along with most of the others and participated in the boy-girl lotteries and signed up for counseling—we would have been interfering.”
“Did you go to a hospital when we were born?”
“Yes,” Jane said, still avoiding their faces.
“That’s not natural,” Letitia said. “Why not let nature decide whether we’d be born alive?”
“We have never claimed to be consistent,” Donald said.
“Donald,” Jane said ominously.
“There are limits,” Donald expanded, smiling placation. “We believe those limits begin when people try to interfere with the sex cells. You’ve had all that in school. You know about the protests when the first PPCs were born. Your grandmother was one of the protesters. Your mother and I are both NGs; of course, our generation has a much higher percentage of NGs.”
“Now we’re freaks,” Letitia said.
“If by that you mean there aren’t many teenage NGs, I suppose that’s right,” Donald said, touching his wife’s arm. “But it could also mean you’re special. Chosen.”
“No,” Letitia said. “Not chosen. You played dice with both of us. We could have been DDs—duds. Dingies. Retards or spaz.”
An uncomfortable quiet settled over the table.
“Don’t use that language,” Jane said tightly.
“Not likely,” Donald said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Your mother and I both have good genotypes. Your grandmother insisted your mother marry a good genotype. There are no developmentally disabled people in our families.”
“So how is that natural? You guys went that far—why not take it the next step?”
They just stared at her. Roald fiddled with his knife and fork. Letitia had been hemmed in. There was no way she could see out of it, so she pushed back her chair and excused herself from the table.
As she made her way up to her room, she heard arguing below. Roald raced up the stairs behind her and gave her a dirty look. “Why’d you have to bring all that up?” he asked. “It’s bad enough at school, we don’t have to have it here.”
She thought about the history the AC had shown her. Back then, a family with their income wouldn’t have been able to live in a four-bedroom house. Back then, there had been half as many people in the United States and Canada as there were now. There had been more unemployment, much more economic uncertainty, and far fewer automated jobs. The percentage of people doing physical labor for a living—simple construction, crop maintenance and harvesting, digging ditches and hard work like that—had been ten times greater then than it was now. Most of the people doing such labor today belonged to religious sects or one of the Wendell Barry farming communes.
Back then, Roald and Letitia would have been considered gifted children with a bright future. She thought about the pictures and the feeling of the past, and wondered if Reena hadn’t been right. She would be a perfect old woman.
Her mother came to her room while Letitia was putting up her hair. She stood in the door frame. It was obvious she had been crying. Letitia watched her reflection in the mirror of her grandmother’s dressing table, willed to her four years before. “Yes?” she asked softly, ageless bobby pins in her mouth.
“It was more my idea than your father’s,” Jane said, stepping closer, hands folded before her. “I mean, I am your mother. That’s a big responsibility. You and I never really talked about this.”
“No,” Letitia said.
“So why now?”
“I’m growing up.”
“Yes.” Jane looked at the soft and flickering pictures hung on the walls, pastel scenes of improbable forests. “When I was pregnant with you, I was very afraid. I worried we’d made the wrong decision, going against what everybody else seemed to think and what everybody was advising or being advised. But I carried you and felt you move … and I knew you were ours, and ours alone, and that we were responsible for you body and soul. I was your mother, not the doctors.”
Letitia looked up at her with mixed anger and frustration … and love.
“And now I see you,” her mother said. “I think back to what I might have felt, if I were your age again, in your position. I might be mad, too. Roald hasn’t had time to feel different; he’s too young. I just came up here to tell you, I know that what I did was right—not for us, not for them …” She indicated the broad world beyond the walls of the house. “But right for you. It’ll work out. It really will.” She put her hands on Letitia’s shoulders. “Your classmates aren’t having an easy time, either. You know that.” She paused, then from behind her back revealed a book with a soft brown cover. “I brought this to show you again. You remember Great-Grandma? Her grandmother came all the way from Ireland, along with her grandpa.” Jane gave her the album. Reluctantly, Letitia opened it up. There were real paper photographs inside, ancient black and white and faded color. Her great-grandmother did not much resemble Grandmother, who had been big-boned, heavy-set. Great-Grandmother looked as if she had been skinny all her life. “You keep this,” Jane said. “Think about it for a while.”
The morning came with planned rain. Letitia took the half-empty metro to school, looking through raindrop-smeared glass at the terraced and gardened and studiously neglected landscape of the suburbs. She walked onto the school grounds and crossed the quad to one of the older buildings, where there was a little-used old-fashioned lavatory. This sometimes served as a sanctuary. She stood in a white stall and breathed deeply for a few minutes, then went to a sink and washed her hands as if conducting some ritual. Slowly, reluctantly, she looked at herself in the cracked mirror.
A janitorial worker rolled in, apologized, then went about its duties, leaving behind the fresh, steamy smell of clean fixtures.
The early part of the day she felt numb. Letitia began to fear her own distance from emotions, from the people around her. She might at any minute step back into the old lavatory and simply fade from the present, travel in time, find herself sixty years in the past …
And what would she think of that?
In her third period class she received a note requesting that she appear in Rutger’s counseling office as soon as was convenient. That was shorthand for immediately; she gathered up her mods and caught Reena’s unreadable glance as she walked past.
Rutger was a handsome man of forty-three (the years were registered on his desk life clock, an affectation of some of the older PPCs) with a broad smile and a garish taste in clothes. He was head of the counseling department and generally well-liked in the school. He shook her hand as she entered the counseling office and offered her a chair. “You wanted to talk?” he asked.
“I guess,” Letitia said.
“Problems?” His voice was a pleasant baritone; he was probably a fairly good singer. That had been a popular trait in the early days of PPCs.
“The ACs say it’s my attitude.”
“What about it?”
“I’m ugly. I’m the only ugly girl in the school.”
Rutger nodded. “I don’t think you’re ugly, but which is worse, being unique or being ugly?”
Letitia lifted the corner of her lip in snide acknowledgment of the funny. “Everybody’s unique now,” she said.
“That’s what we teach. Do you believe it?”
“No,” she said. “Everybody’s the same. I’m …” She shook her head. She resented Rutger prying up the pavement over her emotions. “I’m TB. I wouldn’t mind being a PPC, but I’m not.”
“I think it’s a minor problem,” Rutger said quickly. He hadn’t even sat down; obviously he was not going to give her much time.
“It doesn’t feel minor,” she said, anger poking through the cracks he had made.
“Oh, no
. Being young often means that minor problems feel major. You feel envy and don’t like yourself, at least not the way you look. Well, looks can be helped by diet, or at the very least by time. If I’m any judge, you’ll look fine when you’re older. And I am something of a judge. As for the way the others feel about you … I was a freak once.”
Letitia looked up at him.
“Certainly. Bona fide freak. There are ten NGs like yourself in this school now. When I was your age, I was the only PPC in my school. There was suspicion. There were even riots. Some PPCs were killed in one school when parents stormed the grounds.”
Letitia stared. She hadn’t heard anything about this in class.
“The other kids hated me,” Rutger said. “They had parents who told them PPCs were Frankenstein monsters. They informed me I had been grown in a test tube and hatched out of an incubator. Remember the Rifkin Society? They’re still around, but they’re fringe now. You’ve never experienced real hatred, I suspect. I did.”
“You were nice-looking,” Letitia said. “You knew somebody would like you eventually, maybe even love you. What about me? What I am, the way I look, who will ever want me? And will a PPC ever want to be with a Dingy?”
She knew these were hard questions and Rutger made no pretense of answering them. “Say it all works out for the worst,” he said. “You end up a spinster and no one ever loves you. You spend the rest of your days alone. Is that what you’re worried about?”
Her eyes widened. She had never quite thought those things through. Now she really hurt.
“Everybody out there is choosing beauty for their kids. They’re choosing slender, athletic bodies and fine minds. You have a fine mind, but I have no record of you ever trying out for athletics. So when you’re out in the adult world, sure, you’ll look different. Why can’t that be an advantage? You may be surprised how hard we PPCs try to be different. And how hard it is, since tastes vary so little in our parents. You have that built in.”
Letitia listened, but the layers of paving were closing again. “Icing on the cake,” she said.
Rutger regarded her with shrewd blue eyes and shrugged. “Come back in a month,” he said. “Until then, I think ACs will do fine.”
Little was said at dinner and less after. She went upstairs and to bed at an early hour, feeling logy and hoping for escape. Her father did his usual bedcheck an hour after she had put on her pajamas and lain down.
“Rolled tight?” he asked.
“Mmph,” she replied.
“Sleep tighter,” he said. Her life had been shaped by parents who were comfortable with nightly rituals and formulas.
“Mmph,” she said.
Almost immediately after sleep, or so it seemed, she came abruptly awake. She sat up in bed and realized where she was and who, and she began to cry. She had had the strangest and most beautiful dream, the finest ever without a dream mod. She could not remember details now, try as she might, but waking was almost more than she could bear.
In first period, Georgia Fischer blitzed yet again and had to go to the infirmary. Letitia watched the others and saw a stony cover-up of their feelings.
Edna Corman excused herself in second period and came back with red, puffy eyes and pink cheeks. The tension built through the rest of the day until Letitia wondered how anyone could concentrate. She did her own studying without conviction; she was still wrapped in the dream, trying to decide what it meant.
In eighth period, she once again sat behind John Lockwood. It was as if she had completed a cycle beginning in the morning and ending with her last class. She looked at her watch anxiously. Once again, they were supervised by Mr. Brant, but he also seemed distracted, as if he, too, had had a dream and it hadn’t been as pleasant as hers.
Brant had them cut mods mid-period and begin a discussion on what had been learned. These were the so-called integrative moments when the media learning was fixed by social interaction; Letitia found these periods a trial at the best of times. Reena Cathcart as usual stood out in a class full of dominant personalities.
John Lockwood listened intently, a small smile on his face as he presented a profile to Letitia. He seemed about to turn around and talk to her. She placed her hand on the corner of her console and lifted her finger to attract his attention.
He glanced at her hand, turned away, and with a shudder looked at it again, staring this time, eyes widening. His mouth began to work as if her hand was the most horrible thing he had ever seen. His chin quivered, then his shoulder, and before Letitia could react he stood up and moaned. His legs went liquid beneath him and he fell to the console, arms hanging, then slid to the floor. On the floor, John Lockwood—who had never done such a thing in his life—twisted and groaned and shivered, locked in a violent blitz.
Brant pressed the class emergency button and came around his desk. Before he could reach Lockwood, the boy became still, eyes open, one hand letting go its tight grip on the leg of his seat. Letitia could not move, watching his empty eyes; he appeared so horribly limp.
Brant grabbed the boy by the shoulders, swearing steadily, and dragged him outside the classroom. Letitia followed them into the hall, wanting to help. Edna Corman and Reena Cathcart stood beside her, faces blank. Other students followed, staying well away from Brant and the boy.
Brant lowered John Lockwood to the concrete and began pounding his chest and administering mouth-to-mouth. He pulled a syringe from his coat pocket and uncapped it, shooting its full contents into the boy’s skin just below the sternum.
Letitia focused on the syringe, startled. Right in his pocket; not in the first-aid kit.
The entire class stood in the hallway, silent, in shock. The medical arrived, Rutger following; it scooped John Lockwood onto its gurney and swung around, lights flashing. “Have you administered KVN?” the robot asked Brant.
“Yes. Five cc’s. Direct to heart.”
Room after room came out to watch, all the PPCs fixing their eyes on the burdened medical as it rolled down the hall. Edna Corman cried. Reena glanced at Letitia and turned away as if ashamed.
“That’s five,” Rutger said, voice tired beyond grimness. Brant looked at him, then at the class, and told them they were dismissed. Letitia hung back. Brant screwed up his face in grief and anger. “Go! Get out of here!”
She ran. The last thing she heard Rutger say was, “More this week than last.”
Letitia sat in the empty white lavatory, wiping her eyes, ashamed at her sniveling. She wanted to react like a grownup—she saw herself being calm, cool, offering help to whomever might have needed it in the classroom—but the tears and the shaking would not stop.
Mr. Brant had seemed angry, as if the entire classroom were at fault. Not only was Mr. Brant adult, he was PPC. Did she expect adults, especially adult PPCs, to behave better? Wasn’t that what it was all about?
She stared at herself in the cracked mirror. “I should go home, or go to the library and study,” she told her image. Dignity and decorum.
Two girls walked into the lavatory, and her private moment passed.
Letitia did not go to the library. Instead, she went to the old concrete and steel auditorium, entering through the open stage entrance, standing in darkness in the wings. Three female students sat in the front row, below the stage level and about ten meters from Letitia. She recognized Reena but not the others; they did not share classes with her.
“Did you know him?” the second girl asked Reena.
“No, not very well,” Reena said. “He was in my class.”
“No ducks!” the third snorted.
“Trish, keep it interior, please. Reena’s had it rough.”
“He hadn’t blitzed,” Reena said. “He wasn’t a superwhiz. Nobody expected it.”
“When was his incept?”
“I don’t know,” Reena said. “We’re all about the same age, within a cou
ple of months. We’re all the same model year, same supplements—if it’s something in the genotype, in the supplements …”
“I heard somebody say there have been five so far. I haven’t heard a thing from my parents,” the third said.
“I haven’t either,” said the second.
“Not in our school,” Reena said. “Except for the superwhizes. And none of them have died before now.”
Letitia stepped back in the darkness, hand on mouth. Had Lockwood actually died? She thought for a mad moment of stepping out of the wings, going into the seats and telling the three she was sorry. The impulse faded fast. That would have been intruding. They weren’t any older than she was, and they didn’t sound much more mature.
They sounded scared.
In the morning, at the station room for secondary pre-med, Brant confirmed that John Lockwood had died the day before. “He had a heart attack,” Brant said. Letitia intuited that was not the complete truth. A short eulogy was read, and special hours for psych counseling were arranged for those students who felt they might need it.
The word “blitzing” was not mentioned by Brant, nor by any of the PPCs throughout that day. Letitia tried to research the subject but found precious few materials in the libraries accessed by her mod. She presumed she didn’t know where to look; it was hard to believe that nobody knew what was happening.
The dream came again, even stronger, the next night, and Letitia awoke out of it cold and shivering with excitement. She saw herself standing before a crowd, no single face visible, for she was in a bright spotlight and they were in darkness. She had felt, in the dream, an almost unbearable happiness, grief mixed with joy, unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She loved and did not know what she loved—not the crowd, precisely, not a man, not a family member, not even herself.
She sat up in her bed, hugging her knees, wondering if anyone else was awake. It seemed possible she had never been awake until now; every nerve was alive.
Quietly, not wanting anybody else to intrude on this moment, she slipped out of bed and walked down the hall to her mother’s sewing room. There, in a full-length cheval mirror, she looked at herself as if with new eyes.