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. "Now. You wanted to talk to me?"
"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."
"And what about it?"
"I . . .am ugly. I am the ugliest girl . . .the only girl in this school who is ugly."
Rutger nodded. "I don't think you're ugly, but which is worse, being unique or being ugly?" Letitia lifted the corner of one 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 ner 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. Much more of a freak than you. 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 still suspicion and even riots. Some PPCs were killed in one school when parents stormed the grounds."
Letitia stared.
"The other kids hated me. I wasn't bad-looking, but they knew. They had parents who told them PPCs were Frankenstein monsters. Do you remember the Rifkin Society? They're still around, but they're extreme fringies now. Just as well. They thought I'd been grown in a test tube somewhere and hatched out of an incubator. 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. But what about me? Because of 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 you don't have an athletic body. Or so you seem to be convinced; 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. But 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 his shrewd blue eyes and shrugged. "Come back in a month and talk to me," he said. "Until then, I think autocounselors 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. Rituals and formulas. Her life had been shaped by parents who were comfortable with nightly rituals and formulas.
Almost immediately after sleep, or so it seemed, she cameabruptly awake. She sat up in bed and realized where she was, and who, and 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 general cover-up of 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 she wondered how anyone could concentrate. She did her own studying without any 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 had Mr. Brant supervising. He 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. The others discussed their economics, Reena Cathcart as usual standing 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 noor. 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 full 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 whoever might h
ave 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.
So 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 said. 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 away from Letitia. She recognized Reena but not the other two; they did not share classes with her.
"Did you know him?"
"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. 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 couple 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 had been five so far. I haven't heard anything," 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 pre-med secondary, Brant told them 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 light 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 anybody 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.
"Who are you?" she whispered. She lifted her cotton nightshirt and stared at her legs. Short calves, lumpy knees, thighs not bad—not fat, at any rate. Her arms were softlooking, not muscular, but not particularly plump, a rosy vanilla color with strawberry blotches on her elbows where she leaned on them while reading in bed. She had Irish ancestors on her mother's side; that showed in her skin color, recessed cheekbones, broad face. On her father's side, Mexican and German; not much evidence in her of the Mexican. Her brother looked more swarthy. "We're mongrels," she said. "I look like a mongrel compared to PPC purebreds." But PPCs were not purebred; they were designed.
She lifted her nightshirt higher still, pulling it over her head finally and standing naked. Shivering from the cold and from the memory of her dream, she forced herself to focus on all of her characteristics. Whenever she had seen herself naked in mirrors before, she had blurred her eyes at one feature, looked away from another, special-effecting her body into a more acceptable fantasy. Now she was in a mood to know herself for what she was.
Broad hips, strong abdomen—plump, but strong. From her pre-med, she knew that meant she would probably have little trouble bearing children. "Brood mare," she said, but there was no critical sharpness in the words. To have children, she would have to attract men, and right now there seemed little chance of that. She did not have the "Attraction Peaks" so often discussed on the TV, or seen faddishly headlined on the LitVid mods; the culturally prescribed geometric curves allocated to so few naturally, and now available to so many by design. Does Your Child Have the Best Design for Success?
Such a shocking triviality. She felt a righteous anger grow—another emotion she was not familiar with—and sucked it back into the excitement, not wanting to lose her mood. "I might never look at myself like this again," she whispered.
Her breasts were moderate in size, the left larger than the right and more drooping. She could indeed hold a stylus under her left breast, something a PPC female would not have to worry about for decades, if ever. Rib cage not really distinct; muscles not distinct; rounded, soft, gentle-looking, face curious, friendly, wide-eyed, skin blemished but not so badly it wouldn't recover on its own; feet long and toenails thick, heavily cuticled. She had never suffered from ingrown toenails.
Her family line showed little evidence of tendency to cancer—correctible now, but still distressing—or heart disease or any of the other diseases of melting pot cultures, of mobile populations and changing habits. She saw a strong body in the mirror, one that would serve her well.
And she also saw that with a little makeup, she could easily play an older woman. Some shadow under the eyes, lines to highlight what would in thirty or forty years be jowls, laugh lines . . .
But she did not look old now.
Letitia walked back to her room, treading carefully on the carpet. In the room, she asked the lights to turn on, lay down on the bed, pulled the photo album Jane had given her from the top of her nightstand and gingerly turned the delicate black paper pages. She stared at her great-grandmother's face, and then at the picture of her grandmother as a little girl.
* * *
Individual orchestra was taught by three instructors in one of the older drama classrooms behind the auditorium. It was a popular aesthetic; the school's music boxes were better than most home units, and the instructors were very popular. All were PPCs.
After a half hour of group, each student could retire to box keyboard, order up spheres of countersound to avoid cacophony, and practice.
Today, she practiced for less than half an hour. Then, tongue between her lips, she stared into empty space over the keyboard. "Countersound off, please," she ordered, and stood up from the black bench. Mr. Teague, the senior instructor, asked if she were done for the day.
"I have to run an errand," she said.
"Practice your polyrhythms," he advised.
She left the classroom and walked around to the auditorium's stage entrance. She knew Reena's drama group would be meeting there.
The auditorium was dark, the stage lighted by a few catwalk spots. The drama group sat in a circle of chairs in one illuminated corner of the stage, reading lines aloud from old paper scripts. Hands folded, she walked toward the group. Rick Fayette, a quiet senior with short black hair, spotted her first but said nothing, glancing at Reena. Reena stopped reading her lines, turned, and stared at Letitia. Edna Corman saw her last and shook her head, as if this were the last straw.
"Hello," Letitia said.
"What are you doing here?" There was more wonder than disdain in Reena's voice.
"I thought you might still . . ."
She shook her head.
"Probably not. But I thought you might still be able to use me."
"Really," Edna Corman said.
Reena put her script down and stood. "Why'd you change your mind?"
"I thought I wouldn't mind being an old lady," Reena said. "It's just not that big a deal. I brought a picture of my great-grandmother." She took a plastic wallet from her pocket and opened it to a copy she had made from the photo in the album. "You could make me up like this. Like my great-grandmother."
Reena took the wallet. "You look like her," she said.
"Yeah. Kind of."
"Look at this," Reena said, holding the picture out to the others. They gathered around and passed the wallet from hand to hand, staring in wonder. Even Edna Corman glanced at it briefly. "She actually looks like her great-grandmother."
Rick Fayette whistled with wonder. "You," he said, "will make a really great old lady."
* * *
Rutger called her into his office abruptly a week later. She sat quietly before his desk. "You've joined the drama class after all," he said. She nodded.
"Any reason?"
There was no simple way to express it. "Because of what you told me," she said.
"No friction?"
"It's going okay."
"Very good. They gave you another role to play?"
"No. I'm the old lady. They'll use makeup on me."
"You don't object to that?"
"I don't think so."
Rutger seemed to want to find something wrong, but he couldn't. With a faintly suspicious smile, he thanked her for her time. "Come back and see me whenever you want," he said. "Tell me how it goes."
The group met each Friday, an hour later than her individual orchestra. Letitia made arrangements for home keyboard hookup and practice. After a reading and a half hour of questions, she obtained the permission of the drama group advisor, a spinsterish non-PPC seldom seen in the hallways, Miss Darcy. Miss Darcy seemed old-fashioned and addressed all of her students as either "Mister" or "Miss," but she knew drama and stagecraft. She was the oldest of the six NG teachers in the school.
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