“No. None.”
“Good.”
I knew that only childless couples were eligible for the Sunrise Project. Once a woman had given birth, she was excluded from consideration.
“Mrs. Cumberland, are you aware that you will be required to agree to have no other children?”
After a long hesitation, I answered that I was. And that the project would supply me with one child only. The newslinks were speculating that the technique had been funded and developed because of population pressures, as a way to bribe people to discipline themselves.
“You understand also that the entire process will be handled in vitro. You will not carry the child.”
“You don’t make it easy, Doctor.”
“Once again we have no choice.” His glasses had begun to slide down his nose. “Nevertheless, it’s something I wish my mother could have done for me.” He laughed and adjusted them. “I wouldn’t have to deal with these now.”
“Can we choose the sex?”
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “We will want to maintain a statistical balance, of course. And under the circumstances we think that would not happen if parents were allowed discretion.”
“I see. You think they’d all choose boys.”
“Most would. Many would think a life without children would be especially difficult for females.”
“And wouldn’t it?”
“We’re creating superior humans, Mrs. Cumberland. I think they’ll adjust quite nicely.” Having disposed of that nettlesome topic, he settled back to await my decision.
“I need to think about it,” I said.
“Of course. There’s no hurry.”
“Talk it over with my husband.”
“Yes. I assumed you’d done that. We’ll give you some material to take home. Information about the program, what you can expect, and so on. And some documents to sign, if you elect to come with us. Return them with a check in the full amount, fully refundable if you turn out to be pregnant, fifty percent if you change your mind. Once you’ve done that, we’ll conduct an investigation to ensure your eligibility.” He looked up. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No. Not that I know of.”
“Good. Read through the brochures then, and perhaps we’ll see you here again.”
Outside, I received a security escort through the demonstrators. A TV reporter held up a microphone for me. Was I going to do it? Did I have any moral qualms? What did I think of the charge that this was just another way for the wealthy to suppress everyone else?
I mumbled some noncommittal answers, picked up an escort of security officers, and made for the street. On the way, pickets hurled insults and thrust pamphlets in my hands. Some predicted that the environment would be the first casualty of the program; others argued that Biolab was doing the work of the Devil. The Human Dignity League was out in force, maintaining that Project Sunrise would proliferate and that it was contrary to nature. Still others claimed that the cost of the service ensured elitism. I had to agree with that. Hal and I could consider it only because he’d come into a recent inheritance. (He didn’t let me overlook the irony of that, by the way, when I proposed we use the legacy to pay for an enhanced child.)
One middle-aged man who looked as if he should have had more important things to do tried to conk me with a sign reading BIOLAB DESTROYS FAMILIES; a woman screamed that I was a killer. I didn’t know what to make of that.
The security people turned me loose at the sidewalk, where a tall man with a thin blade of a nose and a long jaw fell in beside me. “Excuse me, ma’m,” he said softly. “May I have a moment?”
He wore a dark business suit and a white carnation, I knew I should have kept going but something in his manner drew me back. “My name’s Plainfield,” he said. His eyes were dark and intense.
“I really don’t want to talk politics,” I said. “Or religion.”
“Of course not.” Despite the almost fearsome appearance, his voice was gentle.
“I apologize for the imposition, but I hoped I might persuade you not to cooperate with these people.” He said it as if he were talking about a disease.
“I don’t see,” I said, “why it’s your concern.”
“It’s everyone’s concern.” He glanced over my shoulder at the storm clouds that were rolling in from the west. Several people, acolytes, camp followers, whatever, were moving in and suddenly I was surrounded. “Imagine,” he said, “imagine what will happen to all of us when this process becomes generally available. And there’s only a trickle of babies coming into the world. When tired old men in ageless bodies have secured their positions. They will never step down. Not ever.” His audience were nodding their approval. “What kind of world do you think that will be?”
“I didn’t create the process,” I said.
“No. But you, and people like you, will guarantee its success. Unless you’re willing to sacrifice your personal ambitions for the common good, in which case you may help defeat it.” He smiled at me as if he could look directly into my soul. “But it’s probably already too late,” he said. “Sunrise got this out of the bottle when nobody was looking, and now we have to find a way to put it back in. Unless you help, unless you join with us, we’re not going to survive. People won’t survive.”
I tried to shake him off, to get away.
But he persisted. “They’re going to replace all the generations of the future with a single wave of genetically-altered creatures. Who, by any reasonable standard, won’t even be human. Is that what you support?”
“I don’t agree that that’s what’s happening.”
“Think about it. Sunrise, practiced on a wide scale, will guarantee that in a very short time, the human race will be dead in the water.”
“That’s absurd.”
“Is it?” A mixture of sadness and anger burned in his eyes. “Put it on a personal level, Mrs.—?”
“—Marshall.” I gave him my mother’s maiden name.
“Mrs. Marshall, do you like your boss?”
“I have to go.” I began pushing my way through. But the crowd moved with me.
“I hope so,” he said. “Because in the world you’re helping create, he’ll never retire. Not ever.”
I broke away finally and hurried toward Ohrbach Avenue, where I’d parked my car so the crazies wouldn’t trash it. I needed ten minutes to get there, and people followed me for a couple of blocks. But they’d disappeared by the time I got behind the wheel.
The talk shows seemed to have no other topic for the day. In fact, the Sunrise Project had been pretty much the sole subject of talk radio and TV since the press conference. Callers seemed unanimously opposed to the process. Most wanted it outlawed, and others thought it sounded suspiciously like something Hitler would dream up. Many wanted to know who would decide what constituted ‘enhancement.’ One said that any woman allowing Biolab to take her child should be horsewhipped. The talk show host allowed that he thought horsewhipping might be a trifle extreme.
No one, not a single individual during the fifteen minutes or so that I listened, thought that gene manipulation should be used to lengthen the lifespan or to enhance physical, psychological, or mental capabilities.
My intention had been to return to work after the interview—I’m a clothing designer for Stratton & Mulberry Associates—but the experience had been more upsetting than I’d expected. So I drove around for most of the rest of the afternoon, and afterward I could not have told you where I’d been.
Hal had tried to discourage me from going. It’s not really something we want to do, he’d said. It’ll be an emotional bath. Why put yourself through it?
But he was unsure too. I knew that. It was in fact a terrible thing to confront the kind of possibility that had suddenly and without warning opened in front of us.
I was waiting in the living room when he got home. Hal was an architect, just beginning to move up in the firm. He was in his late twenties, a model husband in many ways
, and he knew as soon as he walked in the door what had happened. “You went over to that genetic place,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I passed him a cup of coffee. “Yes.”
“How’d it go?”
I told him. I told him about a child who wouldn’t know what it would be to see his, or her, body decline. Whose horizons would be literally unlimited. Who, even though death would eventually come, would never know debilitation.
Hal was just over six feet. He had blue eyes and a good smile and an inability to hide his emotions that, as much as anything, had been what I loved about him. It also made him a poor poker player. Now he looked worried. “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “Do you think they can really do what they say they can?”
“Well, that’s one of the risks, isn’t it?” I’d read everything on enhancement technology that I could find. It had worked fine on monkeys and rabbits and rats. And the test children were doing fine.
“But nobody really knows that these kids won’t age, do they?”
“No. Not really, Hal. But if we wait until the evidence is in, we’re going to be a little long in the tooth to start a family.”
“I know.” He eased down onto the sofa and I could see he was troubled. “I’m sorry any of this technology has been developed. I wish they’d just left things alone.”
The government legislated against it for years, but interest groups had intervened, and I don’t suppose there was any way to keep it from happening. Maybe you could move it back and forth on the calendar a little, but that was probably all.
“We get to pick the personality, right?” he asked.
“Within limits, yes.”
“So we get a respectful happy kid who gives us no trouble?”
“Not too respectful. The booklets explain that they don’t want to take a chance on producing a race of people who’ll kowtow too much to authority. They feel a little rebellion’s a good thing. Especially in the kind of world that might emerge.”
“Great.” Hal grinned. “So that at least won’t change. And we can’t have any other kids.”
“Right.”
“And the child can’t have any at all. Ever.”
“Right.”
“I don’t like that part of it either.” Usually Hal was congenial, able to roll with whatever problems surfaced during the day without letting them work on him. But his face was drawn and pale, and muscles worked in the corners of his jaws. “We have to shelve all our plans. For somebody’s else’s pet ideas. How will we feel thirty years from now when we’ve had only the one kid and his hair starts receding? And he discovers he not only has developed allergies but he can’t have a family because that part of the procedure worked? You really want them to experiment with us? With our future?”
No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. But we did not have the option of waiting several decades for the evidence.
“I think we ought to let it alone,” he said. “Let somebody else put their kids at risk.”
The subject devoured the evening.
We wondered how lonely life would be for an enhanced child. How would he be treated by other kids? Or by other adults, for that matter? How many others like him, or her, would there be? At first, certainly, too few. The bulk of the human race would probably be off-limits. (Unless he pretended to be normal, hid who he really was.) It was hard to see how such a person could form anything like a permanent relationship. Who’d want to live with somebody who was going to watch you age?
Hal said he hated to agree with the Fundamentalists but he wasn’t sure that indefinitely-extended life spans weren’t somehow contrary to the divine plan anyhow. The remark surprised me. “I didn’t think you believed in God,” I said. “You never go to church.”
“Neither do you, Catherine.”
“But I’m not sitting here talking about divine plans.”
“It just seems to me, the way we’re designed, we’re not supposed to go on indefinitely.”
We switched sides and tried to look at all the implications. We kept coming back to what our child would think of us forty years down the road. They took my family from me, and any chance of living a normal life.
And if we declined, when he was suffering from heart disease, liver failure, or she had contracted breast cancer or meningitis, what then would be the verdict on our decision? They played it safe.
He would know. Everybody born from this day forward would know quite clearly that the opportunity had been there. Some parents, most, could say they did not have the money. We wouldn’t have that explanation to offer.
I wondered how many other families were agonizing over the same issue that night.
We went to bed with nothing resembling a resolution, although we’d decided that, to discuss the thing rationally, we had to assume that Armistead and his colleagues could do what they said. That reduced the problem to more manageable, if still daunting, proportions. Would virtual immortality actually be a gift, purchased at the price of sterility? And perhaps of love?
Had Armistead suggested they’d make the child immune to such concerns?
Would I recognize such a child as my own?
I didn’t sleep much.
Next morning—It was a Friday—, I called in sick, wanting to take time to think about the issue that had taken over my life. I knew there’d be no peace until I’d sorted out how I felt. As he left the house, Hal said he was leaning toward forgetting the whole thing. People got along without the Sunrise Project until now, and they’ve done just fine. (That was completely off the point and he knew it. And anyway they hadn’t done so well, had they? They kept dying.) He paused on his way out the door, and a look of frustrated anger came into his eyes. “If we go ahead with it,” he said, “I don’t think the child will thank us.”
I didn’t either. I didn’t think we were likely to be thanked whichever way things went.
The TV reported that antiprotestors had arrived at Biolab and scuffles had broken out. It was going to get ugly, and I asked myself whether I wanted to run that gauntlet again. But that would be a cowardly way to arrive at a decision.
I decided that I needed to get away for a bit. Clear my mind. I got the Honda out and headed for the big cluster mall over on Alpine, passing an IHOP en route and wondering whether one of Armistead’s subjects could pile on pancakes and bacon to his heart’s content and never gain any weight. Not bother to exercise but still retain muscle tone?
The literature promised a marked increase in intelligence and creative capabilities. It was possible, within limits, to provide the child with predispositions in various areas: we could, for example, opt for ingrained musical talent. Whether the talent would develop, the booklets said, would depend on the environment and stimulation provided by the parents.
Talent to what degree? Nobody really knew yet. But genes contributing to a wide range of human abilities and tendencies had been identified. Biolab couldn’t give you a world-class sculptor, but they could provide a running start.
Still, all that was irrelevant. The real issue was very clear: What would the child want? No: maybe what would be best for the child, a different question altogether.
And what did I want? Hal and I were being called on to sacrifice our own plans.
I got bored at the mall and drove through the morning. It was early September and the streets were thick with leaves. I passed an accident, a serious one off Cottonwood Avenue, one car crumpled and lying in a ditch, another on its side. An ambulance was there and a couple of police cars with blue and red lights blinking. Everybody was rubbernecking and traffic barely moved. The EMT’s were trying to get someone out of the crumpled car. I remember thinking that Armistead’s treatment wouldn’t have helped any of the occupants. What would happen to an enhanced person severely injured in a collision? Might his body keep him alive and in pain when he might otherwise have died? It was another question to put to Armistead.
I drifted back to Biolab, parked in the street, and watched the commotion. The
crowd was bigger and louder than it had been yesterday. And there were more police. Some people had been jailed. The radio reported a bomb threat.
I drove on, stopping finally at a playground where I watched mothers with their kids. A pair of twins, a boy and a girl about three, dominated the swings, giggling and laughing. Other children chased one another in endless circles.
An older woman, probably in her seventies, occupied a bench. I sat down beside her and we quickly found ourselves talking about families and child-rearing. She was interested that I had no children and assured me I had much to look forward to. She was frail with white hair and arms in which all the bones were visible. But her color was good, and her eyes were alert.
She’d had a good life, she said. Her husband was dead now, heart attack six years ago, her children of course grown and gone. A lot of grandchildren. Most lived out of town, but they came sometimes to visit.
“Would you do it again?” I asked casually. “If you had the opportunity, would you start over?”
She thought about it. “I wouldn’t mind being twenty again,” she said. I could sense the but lingering in there somewhere. “What an odd question it is.” Her eyes stared past my shoulder. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” And, quickly, “I hope you don’t think I’m prying or anything—.”
“I just wouldn’t want to go through it all again.” She smiled. “It was a lot of work, you know.”
I went into Westbrook Cemetery and watched a funeral. It’s the only time in my life I’ve attended a burial service among complete strangers. One of the mourners was a young woman, pale and ghastly in black. She was swaying, virtually held erect by friends. And three kids wiped bloodshot eyes and held each other’s hands. The cleric, who was a little man with red hair blown about by the wind, intoned the old phrases. “In the sure and certain hope…”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 57