Corrupting Dr. Nice

by John Kessel

  Owen walked down the paved road toward the greenhouse. It was a cool morning, and a mist rose from the water. Most mornings he liked to give Wilma a break from confinement to roam the estate, but that had not worked out too well for the landscaping. Wilma had stripped most of the conifers up to twenty feet, with the higher reaches of foliage in imminent peril. The lilac bushes that had once lined the north border of the estate were memory. Her right front footprint was permanently indented into the service line of the tennis court, and the next time she got into the swimming pool they'd not only have to drain it, but replace half the tiles she'd cracked.

  Owen's parents were after him to move Wilma elsewhere. Twice she had poked her head into second story windows of the big house, terrifying guests. Uncle Suede claimed he would never sleep another quiet night. It wasn't the money, Owen's father insisted. It was the psychological upkeep.

  As soon as Owen entered the new end of the greenhouse--a large stresslar frame over which a single-molecule plastic sheath had been grown--Wilma came crashing toward him through the palms.

  =Here we go again,= Bill muttered.

  Owen unfolded the quilt that one of Wilma's fans had sent, decorated with a huge blue "Wilma." He gathered it together and tried to throw it over her, but the dinosaur kept turning to face him and the quilt kept sliding off.

  "Stay still!" Owen shouted. "We'll play later."

  Wilma was two meters tall at the shoulder, and coming up on three metric tons. When she stood up on her hind legs and stretched out her neck, her head shattered panes in the old greenhouse roof. Owen was beginning to worry that his theory about the dependence of altricial growth rates on degree of nurturing was not going to be borne out by experiment. Or perhaps he was not taking enough care of her--though he did not see how he could do better without getting himself stepped on.

  As if thought were mother to action, Wilma lurched sideways, threatening to smash Owen against the climate control unit. Bill took over, and Owen dove between her legs, did a quick roll and came to his feet on her opposite side. =Try not to get us killed, boss.=

  "That's your job," Owen muttered. Owen hated to admit he was glad he had not had Bill removed. He could not get past the fact that, although Bill's martial arts frenzy back in Jerusalem might have gotten Owen killed, his alerting the hotel security system the previous night had saved Owen's life. So Owen merely complained to his father about Bill's growing eccentricities, and Ralph Vannice ordered a little corrective programming that, for the moment at least, had gotten rid of Bill's sex and God obsession.

  While Wilma was trying to locate Owen on her wrong side, he flipped the quilt over her back and cinched it around her neck and tail. He led her down to the big doors at the other end of the greenhouse and out into the paddock. A gaggle of genetically altered lawn geese scattered at the sight of her, but soon resettled into new programs as they tracked over the estate, keeping the grass eaten down to a half inch. Unlike Wilma, they would only defecate in designated offal areas.

  Owen scanned the skies for helicopters. If there was a pix boat on the sound, it was out of sight. The media barrage had died down, but he could never tell when some infotainment special might want to do an update on the world's only live dinosaur. He did not want to compound the disruption of the past he'd caused by bringing Wilma forward in time. It was not a consideration he would have had before his return. For the nine hundredth time he thought about Genevieve.

  The past year had been difficult. He hated being back home. To parents you never aged past seventeen; it was a struggle to maintain any control over your life. The worst of it was that you started to act as if you were still seventeen, answering questions in monosyllables, spending hours in your room with the door closed, sneaking down the back stairs like a secret agent.

  His hopes of returning quietly to the university had been dashed when during his first paleontology lecture a protester had doused him with smart paint that spelled out "time exploiter" on his chest. It had been unrealistic for him to expect no fallout in the aftermath of the Jerusalem raid and the notoriety Wilma had brought. He'd tried to continue his experiment at Thornberry, but there he had to contend with his parents' expectations. His father reminded him constantly how much money had been spent on the Cretaceous research station, with veiled threats to cut off its funds if no way to make it pay off could be found.

  His mother was almost as bad. Her intentions for him combined romantic entanglements with media extravaganzas, so that Owen was not sure whether she was more interested in getting him married off, or in broadcasting the wedding, complete with footage of Wilma towing a wedding carriage, to a billion subscribers of ATD Pix.

  From the walk-in cooler Owen got a wheelbarrow-load of orchids and dumped them into the stainless steel washtub that Wilma used for a food dish. The sweet smell of vanilla perfumed the air. Though the dinosaur came from a period before the advent of flowering plants, Owen had discovered that she required a variety of nectar unavailable in the 21st century except from the Orchidaceae, in particular the Vanilla fragrans. Wilma would not settle for vanilla extract, so at $600 a day, orchids were the cheapest supply. Owen hauled a sack onto his shoulder, pulled the drawstring and poured oats in with the orchids, then mixed them with a spade.

  The apatosaurus fell to her breakfast. Oats dribbled out of the corners of her mouth as she ground them between her pencil-like teeth. Owen liked to watch the contemplative expression on her face as she chewed her food. She ran through the tub in a few minutes, then snuffled at its bottom, blowing air through her high nostrils and sucking up the dregs. "All gone, girl," Owen said, and opened the gate at the end of the paddock to let Wilma out onto the grounds.

  The dinosaur trotted out, whipping her slender tail a meter off the ground. Owen tried to lead her up the slope, but Wilma headed for the sound. The air was warming: the mist had already burned off the water. He followed Wilma down the edge of the road toward the shore. She did not like to walk on the road, and had given the gardener fits trying to maintain the perennials that lined it.

  When they were halfway down, passing the guest cottages, a voice called out to him. "Dr. Vannice!"

  Jeeves, the household robot, jogged down toward Owen from the house. He had developed a limp. Jeeves was one of his parents' expensive playthings: humanoid robots were totally impractical.

  Jeeves stumbled to a stop. Ornamental lights winked on his brushed silver chest. "Dr. Vannice," the robot said. "Your mother wishes to speak with you."

  "I'm not coming to her party."

  "Yes, sir. She asked me to inform you this is not about your inadequate social life," Jeeves said calmly.

  Owen wished his mother wouldn't insult him in front of the help. Hearing Jeeves's voice, Wilma came to a dead stop in the last of the American Beauty roses. She was fascinated by Jeeves. Though Jeeves was wary of her, he was not nimble enough to protect himself . She whipped her tail around. Owen hopped over it, but it caught the robot at the ankles and toppled him flat on the lawn.

  "Wilma, no!" Owen shouted.

  Jeeves labored to stand, then backed off a few steps. "Very good, sir. Shall I report that you are coming?" A piece of sod was stuck to his grille.

  "I'll come in a minute," Owen said.

  "Your mother will be pleased, sir. She awaits in the north parlor."

  There wasn't much point in dragging it out. An hour alone wouldn't hurt Wilma. He followed the butler back up the hill toward the house. Above the verandah the windows gleamed in the morning sun.

  Owen came in through the basement level entrance and went up to the north parlor. To his dismay, both of his parents were there. His father sat in his tall leather wing-backed chair, wearing a mid-twentieth century business suit, with vest. A white cat slept on his lap, sniffing at the plate of breakfast steaks beside him. More of his father's protein obsession.

  Ralph Siddhartha Vannice looked twenty years older than he had the day before, gray hair slicked back from a high forehead. His skin was d
arker. "Owen, my son," he said, "What have we done to make you treat us with such disrespect?" He scratched the cat behind the ears.

  "Excuse me, Dad? Disrespect?" Clearly Ralph had been sampling some new Vannicom personality template. His voice was all raspy.

  "Your mother and I call you on serious business, and we expect you to come. You keep us waiting."

  "But I came right away!"

  "If you paid more attention to the family business, you would know we need to speak with you, and would have been here already."

  "Business? What business?"

  A look of injured dignity crossed his father's face. He turned to Owen's mother. "Rose, what are we going to do with this boy?"

  "Enough of the simulation, Ralph. It's very good, though." Rosethrush Rigsby Vannice wore her Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Eisenhower jacket, riding skirt and calf-length boots. She leaned against the mantle, rested a foot on one of the massive logs beside the fireplace and tapped her riding crop against the top of the fire screen. In an age where the wives and daughters of the wealthy had widely reassumed the retiring habits of the Victorian era, Owen's mother was a stunning exception.

  "Owen," she said. "Your father and I have a couple of propositions we'd like to discuss with you."

  Owen sat on the Civil War era horsehair sofa, the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in the house.

  "We're on the verge of getting the exclusive rights to the Zealot trials," his mother said. "We're hoping to foster the biggest legal extravaganza since the Pope tried to sell Saint Peter's. And you can help us. You and Wilma are the poster children of time exploitation."

  "I'm not an exploiter."

  "Yes, dear, we know that. But the public at large has a different impression."

  Owen looked at his mood boots. They were a melancholy violet. "When does this start?"

  "We expect the contract between Saltimbanque and LEX to be signed by next month."

  "I don't see why you can't keep us out of the press, mother. You know I hate it."

  "If you truly cared about our feelings, Owen, you'd at least do an interview on Hour of Carnage."

  Owen cast his glance about the room, trying to avoid his mother's gaze. This was a mistake. Beside him on the end table was a frozen head. His mother had bought up the stock when the cryonics companies had gone belly-up in the wave of postwar bankruptcies, and had turned them to a profit by leasing the frozen dead as objets d'art. There was not a trendy apartment in Manhattan that did not have a corpsicle as a conversation piece. His mother had them fitted with microsystems to maintain the hard freeze within their transparent cases, and an AI in each base programmed with the biographical information the cryoclients had carefully preserved at the time of their deaths. You could turn them on and hold a conversation with the deceased.

  Theirs was named Morgan. As a boy Owen had been so scared of Morgan he had avoided going into the living room by himself, and even now he felt uneasy sitting next to it. But the torture his parents put him through made him want to annoy them back. Owen thumbed the switch and a snotty British voice came out of the speaker. "Hello. My name is Morgan. I was a writer and controversialist. I will be alive after you are dead, you pathetic loser."

  "You are already dead," Ralph Vannice said.

  "Check back in three hundred years."

  Ralph Vannice was amused by the head's pluck. "Morgan, you are my favorite piece of furniture."

  "Maybe you'd like it better if I had Morgan's personality," Owen said.

  "This is what I mean by disrespect," his father rasped. "Son, no one cares about your personality. You may have no interest in the family business, but even you might have noticed that body shaping has become a major profit center." Ralph Vannice set down the cat, brushed the knee of his suit. He was visibly shifting out of character. "SomatoDream nets eight billion a quarter twanking the ugly into the beautiful. But the next phase is going to be radical gene shaping. Already some people aren't content to make themselves into Cary Grant. They want to be an eagle, an angel, a 600-pound gorilla."

  "What has this got to do with me?"

  "Imagine it, Owen," his father said. "We don't just give them a chance to be a celebrity, we give them the opportunity to become a dinosaur. There's not a high school boy in Connecticut who wouldn't give his eye teeth to be a velociraptor. It would have helped if you'd brought back a meat eater, but this brontosaurus is a start. We clip a few genes and give the public the thrill of knowing what it's like to be a genuine thunder lizard! It can't miss."

  "But Dad, you know that I'm against messing with Wilma's genes. That's why we haven't cloned her."

  His mother joined in. "You steal her out of her era, but you won't take a few cells from her." She rested the riding crop against the rack of fireplace tools. "This trial raises important legal issues. The chronoprotection people want to get real restrictions on exploiting the past. If they get their way they won't let you study dinosaurs in their natural era, let alone bring them into the present."

  "Maybe I agree with them."

  "The people who drove you out of your university?" his mother said. "If you don't let us strike back, we're going to lose this fight, and you'll lose Wilma with it."

  "I'll think about it," Owen said.

  "You should do more than think." Ralph Vannnice ran a hand through his hair, and sighed. His mother exchanged a look with him, then, like a tag-team wrestler, resumed the assault.

  "Owen, when was the last time that you had a date?"

  "Mother--"

  "I want you to get out of the house. It's unnatural for a man of your age to spend his time with a dinosaur."

  "You're our only child, Owen," his father said. "We don't want our genetic information withering on the vine." He held the plate of breakfast steaks out to Owen. "Are you getting enough protein, son?"

  Owen was going to have to put up a fight or he would be reduced to a heap of pencil shavings on the fine oak floor. "My vine is not withering, Dad, thank you. Given how hard it is to get a divorce these days, you ought to be glad I'm being careful who I marry."

  "Can't you just get some girl pregnant?" Ralph said.

  "Mother, how can you let him say that? It goes against everything you've taught me."

  "We should never have sent him to that finishing school, Rose. I think they finished him."

  "I really can't see why this is any of your business. You could just as easily generate a new child yourselves. Pick out just the traits you want, engineer him to be dutiful and stupid."

  "Now he's angry," Rosethrush said. "Come here, son."

  "Mom, please."

  "Is Doctor Nice going to throw a tantrum?"

  Reluctantly, Owen went to her. She pulled his head down, hugged him to her chest. The battle ribbons she'd won chairing the Academy's Ratings Board were rough against his cheek. "You know we love you, Owen. We have only your best interests---plus those of several multi-trillion-dollar commercial enterprises---at heart. So I want---"

  Jeeves limped to the door. "I beg your pardon, madam. A phone call for Dr. Vannice."

  Owen thanked the gods. "I'd better get that," he said.

  "Can't you have your simulant take it?" his mother asked.

  Learn to pretend. "Dr. Pemberton at the college is supposed to call me about setting up a habitat for Wilma. You want her out of here, don't you?"

  His mother looked disappointed. "Take it on the screen in my study," she said.

  As he passed the verandah he could see Wilma down by the waterside ripping shingles off the boathouse. He headed for the phone in his mother's office. "Yes?" he said, hitting the display key.

  A woman appeared on the screen. It was Genevieve Faison. Owen swallowed hard and sat down. "Genevieve!"

  "Pardon me?"

  "Genevieve, don't pretend you don't remember."

  "My name is not Genevieve, it is Emma Zume. I represent the Committee to Protect the Past. Are you are Dr. Owen Vannice?"

  "The Committee to P
rotect the Past?"

  =Don't believe her, boss.=

  "I am calling to urge you to meet with our organization regarding your removal of a dinosaur from its natural habitat for commercial exploitation."

  =Make her prove who she is.=

  "I'll find out who she is," Owen subvocalized. To the woman on the screen he said, "I'll need some proof that you are who you say you are."

  "If you'll check your mail, you'll find my bona fides, certified by Electronic Vouchers Ltd."

  Owen called up his mailbox on a window, and sure enough, the top item was a bonded identification file for Emma Amelia Zume.

  "Ms. Zume, I've never heard of your committee. But you are about the fiftieth chronological protection activist to pester me about what is a scientific experiment, not an attempt to exploit the past. Personally, I am all for a 'hands off the past' policy. If you'll give me your address I'll even send you a contribution. Other than that we have nothing to talk about."

  A flush crossed the woman's cheeks. It was a beautiful face, and the resemblance to Genevieve Faison was uncanny. There was something more formal about her manner, however. Her hair was much longer than Gen's, piled up on the top of her head in a fractal snarl. And her eyes seemed different. But if his father had customers twanking themselves in to gorillas, Owen was not going to be taken in by some elementary ruse.

  "I ask you in all simplicity, and with good will," Emma Zume said, "to put aside your greed and think about the welfare of this animal. Your fame won't last forever. Consult your conscience."

  =This is ripe, boss, her telling you to consult your conscience. Hang up.=

  It was good advice. "I'm not interested in money," Owen said. "And I'd rather be dead than famous."

  "If you're not interested in money, then why is this creature's image all over ATD's tabloid pix shows? Why does every gang have a flag replaying your assault on the zealots? Why does Hemisphere Confidential Report call you 'Professor Extinction'? 'The Paleontologist Plutocrat'? 'Feet of Death'?"

  "Jerusalem led to a lot of publicity that, believe me, I did not want."

  "Even though ATD Pix bankrolled your 'experimental' research station in the Cretaceous to the tune of 50 billion dollars?"