Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  INTELLIGENCE. As high as possible, she thought fervently. The highest. So her daughter would never be held back in the work she wanted to do, never meet the helpless, pitying looks of people trying uselessly to explain.

  ASSERTIVENESS. There she quarreled with Michael. She wanted high assertiveness—someone who could hold her own. Michael argued for moderation, saying that it made for a happier person. He had teased her gently: “Our daughter doesn’t have to be a world-shaker.” She had frowned and shaken her head.

  SPECIAL TALENTS, RESISTANCES, TOLERANCES …

  She sighed, laid the chart aside and smiled at Michael. “All right, I’m coming. But this weekend …”

  He threw up his hands in mock dismay. “I concede! This weekend, we’ll have it out. Now come on and get some sleep.”

  It was forty minutes by tubetrain from Washington to New York, half an hour by bus and pedwalk to the towering building that was the East Coast headquarters of the Federal Population and Genetics Commission. They entered from the elevated walkways on the third level and almost immediately got lost. They asked directions twice, wandering through waiting rooms full of plastic benches, past signs that said “GENETICS RATING APPEALS RM 476-A” and “ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION REGISTRANTS APPLY 1:30-5 PM.”

  Finally they found the elevators that would take them up to the Genetic Surgery Division. As they waited, it seemed to Evelyn that people glanced at them with a mixture of envy and resentment. Some were probably people with genetic defects, who would not be allowed to have their own children at all. And most people could not afford actual gene surgery, even if they qualified. But we’ve earned it, Evelyn thought. We’ve worked long and hard for our chance.

  On the twenty-second floor, a receptionist directed them to a small carpeted waiting room. Evelyn sat down and tried to calm herself. After a few minutes a woman walked up to the receptionist’s desk. She was remarkably tall, with heavy blond hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her neck. Her face could only have been created by a Greek sculptor or a bioengineer. She had the classic straight line of forehead and nose, the small bowed mouth, the strong graceful curve from cheek to chin. She beckoned them over and smiled down at them. “I’m Dr. Morland, your geneticist. Please come with me.” Her eyes were gray. Of course, Evelyn thought. Gray-eyed Athena, divinely tall …

  They followed her into a roomy office. Evelyn looked around at the tall windows, the bookshelves, the charts of the double-helix DNA molecule on the wall. Here we are, she thought. It’s beginning.

  Dr. Morland congratulated them on their decision to have an engineered child. “You two have excellent genetic ratings, and I’m sure that this child will be rewarding both for you and for our society as a whole. Now—since this is your first appointment, let me review the options open to you.”

  What Morland told them was familiar to Evelyn from Commission publications, until she heard with dismay that prices for most alterations were going up again. She was frantically trying to recalculate costs in her head when Morland reached “intelligence.”

  “You can choose an IQ range up to approximately one hundred fifty on the Hoffman scale,” she said. “That’s equivalent to two hundred on the old scale.” On the old scale two hundred had been the top, the outer limit. The Hoffman scale just kept going. “The cost for IQ will depend on whether—”

  “Excuse me.” Evelyn sat up very straight. “I thought that engineering could take the IQ up as high as Hoffman one eighty with no trouble.”

  Dr. Morland paused. “It can be done, although not without trouble. Nothing involving intelligence is simple. The policy of the Commission is not to aim for more than forty points over the higher of the parents’ IQs. Larger gaps tend to produce serious problems in adjustment between parents and child.”

  “You mean we have no choice? That’s a legal limit?”

  “It isn’t a matter of law. However, it’s a firm Commission policy, growing out of our experience. After all, Hoffman one fifty is quite a high IQ.”

  “But there are already engineered who are higher—and they’re having kids now, and their kids can go up another forty points. I don’t want my daughter left behind before she even starts.”

  “Of course not. But that isn’t the case.” Morland smiled her serene, Greek-goddess smile. “First of all, not all the engineered want children brighter than they are. Also, at this point no one can go much beyond one eighty. No single gene controls intelligence. We have to work with a whole series of genes that influence the formation of brain cells, the keenness of certain types of perception, and so on. Those same genes also affect other characteristics, so in trying to increase intelligence, we could produce bad side effects. We don’t know enough yet to go too far. Your child will be near the top of the range. She should have every chance to excel in any field she enters.”

  She paused a moment. Evelyn was sick with resentment.

  Morland went on. “The cost of altering intelligence will depend on whether both of you contribute genes. The alternative is to use one gamete from one of you, and the other from an engineered donor who has some of the qualities you want, such as high intelligence. Then we simply have to assure dominance of those qualities by repressing the appropriate genes on your gamete. That’s relatively simple. The amount of actual gene surgery—removing some of your genes and inserting others in the chromosomes—is greatly reduced.”

  She paused, looking from one to the other. Evelyn, her stomach still tight with anger, said nothing.

  “We want it to be our own child,” Michael said.

  Morland nodded. “Many people feel that way.”

  “It’s going to be rough, though,” Michael went on. “With these new prices, I’m not sure we can afford all the alterations we had in mind.”

  She nodded again. “It’s too bad, but prices do go up. I see by your preliminary chart that you aren’t interested in special tolerances or talents—music and so forth. That’s good, since those are quite expensive. As for the rest, you’ll have to balance your priorities against what you can afford. I see you have down soma-typing, for instance. That’s fairly simple, and not so expensive in itself. Still, you might want to save money there and put it toward intelligence.”

  Michael nodded. “That’s probably what we’ll have to do. The intelligence is the most important thing, after all.”

  “That’s true. Now—this is the complete schedule of rates. This chart also shows interrelations between various qualities, so you can see the implications of your choices. You’ll need to complete these forms … .”

  Evelyn was staring from Morland to Michael, her face gone rigid. Were they going to pretend that appearance was not important? Michael had promised! She had worked so hard to convince him! And Morland—did she think, because they were norms, it did not matter if their child got second-class treatment?

  Michael was on his feet, shaking hands across the desk. “Thank you for your time.”

  “Certainly. I’ll look forward to seeing you again.”

  Evelyn forced herself to nod and smile politely. Five years, she thought. Scrimping and driving themselves. Now they were trying to steal her daughter’s future.

  She was silent while they made their way through the huge building to the sunlit plaza. As they walked out, Michael said, “The price rise is a real shame. But now at least we have a better idea just how much we can do.”

  “You mean how little,” Evelyn said.

  Michael looked at her, startled. “Hey, come on—it’s not that bad.”

  “It’s not? No soma-typing, and limited intelligence—”

  “Wait a minute. I wouldn’t call Hoffman one fifty limited.”

  “Oh, it’s not—for a norm.” Evelyn turned away and walked blindly into the plaza. She stopped before a fountain that sent a dozen jets of water foaming high into the air. All around her, people went briskly about their business, their footsteps clicking on the pavement. Michael came up beside her and took her arm.

  �
��Hon, listen. I know you have your expectations all set—but I think you’re overreacting. The doctor’s right. She’ll still be near the top.”

  “When the top is already Hoffman one eighty? Do you think thirty IQ points are a slight margin? And the top will keep going up.”

  “All right. Maybe it will. But you know, there’s something to what the geneticist said about the gap between parents and child. I keep thinking of Anna Holden and her son. Remember when he left?”

  Anna Holden had lived in their complex for a while: a dowdy, middle-aged woman, pouring her family trust fund into the child of her dreams. She brooded over him constantly, and raged and cried when he went beyond her. “My own son, not even sixteen, and he won’t tell me a thing. All day at school, all night in that lab—I’m sorry I had it fixed up for him. He won’t even talk to me. My own child, my son.” What could he say to her? One night she stood screaming down the hall: “Come back here! Come back, you hear me?” Her son strode away, his back straight, his long hair swinging. He had the face of a young Comanche. “I’m your mother,” Anna yelled. He paused and turned, giving her a look of measureless contempt. “You?”

  Evelyn shook her head, pushing the memory away. “Anna was neurotic—always clinging to him. It’s no wonder he wanted to get away.” She found herself irrationally angry that Michael had even brought the incident up. She thought, My daughter will never hate me. She calmed herself and went on. “The problem is that you’re still thinking in our terms. An IQ of Hoffman one fifty would be outstanding for us. For the engineered, it’s only moderate.”

  “Then moderate may have to do, Evelyn. Do you think we’d be able to fight Commission policy? Do you?”

  Evelyn shrugged, not wanting to answer. No, the policy would not yield, not for a couple of norms. She stared at the glittering fountain, and her sense of defeat gradually gave way to a grim determination.

  “All right, Michael,” she said. “She won’t be as smart as some. But she’ll be one of the engineered. She’ll have a fighting chance to do whatever she wants with her life. We just have to give her what she needs to make the most of her chance. She has to have the soma-typing.”

  Michael came around in front of her and looked into her eyes. His plain face was intent and troubled. “Listen. I know how you feel about this. And I was willing to go along, before the price rise. But it isn’t that important, Evelyn—it just isn’t.”

  She tried to interrupt, but he hurried on. “I want the best for my children—you know that. I want them to have every chance I can give them. I want them to be happy. I want them to contribute something to the world, and take pride in themselves. Those are the things that matter. If she isn’t so beautiful that she doesn’t even look human, that won’t be a tragedy. I’d rather she looked like you.”

  There was a note of pleading in his voice. He wanted her to yield gracefully, so they would not have to fight—with each other or with circumstances. After their long struggle, he did not want his sourness at the end.

  She understood. Sympathy warred with her rising anger, so that her voice came out rough. “Do you think I’ve waited all these years to have a child who’ll be sort of engineered? Who’ll be on the edges, talked past, ignored? Do you know what it would do to her, to give her engineered intelligence but not make her really one of them? To be held back, looked down on, kept from using what’s in her—nothing’s worse than that. Nothing could be crueler.”

  Michael looked away, silenced by her outburst. After a moment he said, “I just don’t see how we could do it. With these new prices—I went over our savings just last night. We’ll have to take out a loan even without soma-typing. If we want that too, we’d have to work another year, maybe more, and the way the costs keep going up—”

  “I’m thirty-six now. We can’t afford a host mother. We have to do it soon.

  “well, there you are.”

  “Oh, no. We’ll get a bigger loan.”

  “What makes you think we can? Our savings will be gone after this, and we won’t have much in the way of collateral.”

  We’ll find a bank that’ll give us the money, she thought. Or something. Whatever they had to do. There had to be a way.

  After a moment of her grim silence, Michael said, “I’m sorry. I know how much this child means to you.”

  She patted his arm. “It’s not your fault.” But she rankled inside. It was his child too, wasn’t it?

  Evelyn was back at the lab by early afternoon. She worked in a rambling, sunny building whose long halls were permeated by a faint medicinal smell compounded by many chemicals. No matter what her mood, entering that building always gave her a secret lift of excitement. The lab was a world leader in biochemical research. That fact still held magic for Evelyn. She worked under Dr. Lin, an engineered biochemist who was designing microorganisms to manufacture cheap, high-quality protein. It was the kind of work Evelyn loved above all others: the merging of discipline and creativity, the reshaping of life itself. She had dreamed of doing that kind of work when she was a student. The engineered had already been moving in everywhere; no one had understood then just what a difference that made.

  Evelyn entered Dr. Lin’s work area, passed the closed shelves by the door where various cultures were growing and went to the table at the rear of the room. Wilson, on night shift, had been scheduled to set up a Kjeldahl analysis to test the amount of protein in several strains. Evelyn glanced at the flasks on the burner and stopped. “Damn,” she said under her breath. She checked each flask. There was no crystallization, nothing to measure. She looked them all over again. Wilson must have left out the catalyst. Of all the stupid times to mess up a routine procedure—She went back to her desk and called Dr. Lin.

  Lin came in to look, though there was nothing he could do but fume. Evelyn, checking nutrient levels in the cultures near the lab door, could hear his irritated grumbling. “How could anyone be so careless?”

  One of the other researchers had followed him in. He shrugged. “It’s bound to happen sometimes. People run these tests over and over, and sometimes they’ll slip up.”

  “Did he have to slip on this one? It’ll set back my whole schedule. It’ll take two weeks to culture enough of some of these strains for another analysis.”

  “Well, it’s your own fault, really. If it was that important, you shouldn’t have left it for the night shift, when the regular supervisors aren’t around. You can’t leave important work to norms.”

  There was a split second of realization, of stillness, before Evelyn straightened up and walked away.

  Later that afternoon, she worked out a new schedule for comparative protein tests, to cut the time loss as much as possible. Dr. Lin stopped by as she was hanging up her lab coat and getting ready to leave.

  “Thanks for doing the new schedule,” he said. “If you’d been here, this mistake never would have happened. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Seeing the apology in his eyes, she was torn between gratitude and resentment. “You’re the best assistant in the whole section,” he said. “You’re really a very able chemist. If it weren’t for bioengineering—”

  “I know.”

  There was a small silence. She smiled stiffly and left.

  Evelyn was off work at the restaurant that night, but Michael would be late again. In the living room, after dinner, she called banks. The evening applications clerks regarded her with bland courtesy from the view screen. She had a neat sheet of figures before her in Michael’s handwriting; he had done the most recent view of their savings and prospects. She gave the clerks account numbers and balances, income, lists of collateral, credit reference numbers. They punched it all into their terminals, applied their credit equations and politely told her where her upper limit would fall on their standard loan policy charts. Since her loan request was substantially above the limit, they offered her appointments with their loan officers for an individual review of her case. Evelyn set up three appointments. But she knew with a sinking in her s
tomach that Michael was right. They would not get a loan big enough to cover soma-typing.

  She sat with her chin in her hand, thinking. The apartment was quiet, except for tiny clicks from the dining alcove, where Randy was putting together a puzzle. Where else could she turn? She thought of her sister in Arizona. Evelyn had made her some small loans for graduate school, but they hardly even kept in touch anymore.

  “Hey, Mom,” Randy called.

  “What is it?”

  “You want to see my puzzle? I’m almost done.”

  “Not right now, Randy.”

  “But I’m almost done, I got it all figured out.”

  “Not now. I’ll look at it later.”

  “But Mom—”

  “Randy,” she said sharply, “leave me alone. I’m busy.”

  He fell silent. She put a hand over her eyes, thinking, What am I going to do? Then she punched call numbers for Arizona. The screen flickered and cleared, and there was her sister, nervous and vaguely apologetic as always. When Evelyn brought up the question of a loan, she looked distressed and began to run on about troubles at the irrigation project. Her designs had been off because of the water needs of the new hybrids, and her supervisor was furious; her husband Warren was facing a shake-up in his department; when the new design programs were installed she might not have a job at all. She really did not see how they could make a loan right then.

  Anyway, she added hesitantly, sometimes she wasn’t sure that all this engineering was such a good idea after all.

  “Oh, come on,” Evelyn said, startled into impatience. “Where would we be without it? Who do you think has pulled off most of the breakthroughs of the last twenty years? Industry, transportation, cleaning up the environment, the cities—”

  “No more slums in Washington?” her sister asked. Evelyn did not answer. “There are some out here,” her sister went on. “And people unemployed—you should see them. What good is an automated factory to the people who used to work there?”