The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (102 page)

We walked across through perfect landscaping, Frieda supplying the fund of inane chatter that such women always have at their disposal. The house had been built a hundred years earlier for a silent-film star. Huge, pink, gilded at windows and doors, it called to mind an obese lawn flamingo. We entered a huge foyer floored in black-and-white marble, which managed to look less Vermeer than checkerboard. A sulky girl in dirty jeans lounged on a chaise longue. She stared at us over the garish cover of a comic book.

“Suky, get up,” Frieda snapped. “This is Miss Snow and her manager Mr, uh, Tangler. My daughter Suky.”

The girl got up, made an ostentatious and mocking curtsey, and lay down again. Frieda made a noise of outrage and embarrassment, but I felt sorry for Suky. Fifteen – the same age as Ethan – plain of face, she was caught between a mother who’d appropriated her fashions and twin sisters who appropriated all the attention. Frieda would be lucky if Suky’s rebellion stopped at mere rudeness. I made her a mock little bow to match her curtsey, and watched as her eyes widened with surprise. I grinned.

Frieda snapped, “Where are the twins?”

Suky shrugged. Frieda rolled her eyes and led us through the house.

They were playing on the terrace, a sun-shaded sweep of weathered stone with steps that led to more lawn, all backed by a gorgeous view of vineyards below the Sierra Madres. Frieda settled us on comfortable, padded chairs. A robo-server rolled up, offering lemonade.

Bridget and Belinda came over to us before they were called. “Hello!” Jane said with her melting smile, but neither girl answered. Instead, they gazed steadily, unblinkingly at her for a full thirty seconds, and then did the same with me. I didn’t like it, or them.

Arlen’s Syndrome, like all genetic tinkering, has side effects. No one knows that better than I. Achondroplasia dwarfism is the result of a single nucleotide substitution in the gene FGFR3 at codon 380 on chromosome 4. It affects the growth bones and cartilage, which in turn affects air passages, nerves, and other people’s tolerance. Exactly which genes were involved in Arlen’s were a trade secret, but the modifications undoubtedly spread across many genes, with many side effects. But since only females could be genemod for Arlen’s, the X chromosome was one of those altered. That much, at least, was known.

The two eleven-year-old girls staring at me so frankly were small for their age, delicately built: fairy children. They had white skin, silky fair hair cut in short caps, and eyes of luminous gray. Other than that, they didn’t look much alike, fraternal twins rather than identical. Bridget was shorter, plumper, prettier. From a Petri-dishful of Frieda’s fertilized eggs, the Barringtons had chosen the most promising two, had them genemoded for Arlen’s Syndrome, and implanted them in Frieda’s ageing but still serviceable womb. The loving parents, both exhibitionists, had splashed across the world-wide media every last detail – except where and how the work had been done. Unlike Rima Ridley-Jones, the Arlen’s child that Jane had spoken with last week, these two were carefully manufactured celebrities.

Jane tried again. “I’m Jane Snow, and you’re Bridget and Belinda. I’m glad to meet you.”

“Yes,” Belinda said, “you are.” She looked at me. “But you’re not.”

There was no point in lying. Not to them. “Not particularly.”

Bridget said, with a gentleness surprising in one so young, “That’s okay, though.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was okay,” Belinda said.

There was no answer to that. The Ridley-Jones child hadn’t behaved like this; in addition to shielding her from the media, her mother had taught her manners. Frieda, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair like a spectator at a play, interested in what her amazing daughters would say next, but with anxiety on overdrive. I had the sense she’d been here before. Eleven-year-olds were no longer adorable, biddable toddlers.

“You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me, at the same moment that Bridget put a hand on her sister’s arm. Belinda shook it off. “Let me alone, Brid. He should know. They all should know.” She smiled at me and I felt something in my chest recoil from the look in her gray eyes.

“You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me with that horrible smile. “No matter what you do, Jane will never love you. And she’ll always hate it when you touch her even by mistake. Just like she hates it now. Hates it, hates it, hates it.”

It started with a dog.

Dr Kenneth Bernard Arlen, a geneticist and chess enthusiast, owned a toy poodle. Poodles are a smart breed. Arlen played chess twice a week in his Stanford apartment with Kelson Hughes from Zoology. Usually they played three, four, or five games in a row, depending on how careless Hughes got with his end game. Cosette lay on the rug, dozing, until checkmate of the last game, when she always began barking frantically to protest Hughes’s leaving. The odd thing was that Cosette began barking before the men rose, as they replaced the chessmen for what might, after all, have been the start of just another game. How did she know it wasn’t?

Hughes assumed pheromones. He, or Arlen, or both, probably gave off a different smell as they decided to call it a night. Pheromones were Hughes’s field of research; he’d done significant work in mate selection among mice based on smell. He had a graduate student remove the glomeruli from adult dogs and put them through tests to see how various of their learned responses to humans changed. The responses didn’t change. It wasn’t pheromones.

Now not only Hughes but also Arlen was intensely intrigued. The Human Genome Project had just slid into Phase 2, discovering which genes encoded for what proteins, and how. Arlen was working with Turner’s Syndrome, a disorder in which females were born missing all or part of one of their two X chromosomes. The girls had not only physical problems but social ones; they seemed to have trouble with even simple social interactions. What interested Hughes was that Turner Syndrome girls with an intact paternal X gene, the one inherited from the father, managed far better socially than those with the maternal X functioning. Something about picking up social cues was coded for genetically, and on the paternal X.

Where else did social facility reside in the genome? What cues of body language, facial expression, or tone of voice was Cosette picking up? Somehow the dog knew that when Hughes and Arlen set the chessmen in place, this wasn’t the start of a new game. Something, dictated at least in part by Cosette’s genes, was causing processes in her poodle brain. After all, Hughes’s dog, a big dumb Samoyed, never seemed to anticipate anything. Snowy was continually surprised by gravity.

Arlen found the genes in dogs. It took him ten years, during which he failed to get tenure because he wouldn’t publish. After Stanford let him go, he still didn’t publish. He found the genes in humans. He still didn’t publish. Stone broke, he was well on the way to bitter and yet with his idealism undimmed – an odd combination, but not unknown among science fanatics. Inevitably, he crossed paths with people even more fanatical. Kenneth Bernard Arlen joined forces with off-shore backers to open a fertility clinic that created super-empathic children.

Empathy turns up early in some children. A naturally empathic nine-month-old will give her teddy bear to another child who is crying; the toddler senses how bad the other child feels. People who score high in perceiving others’ emotions are more popular, more outgoing, better adjusted, more happily married, more successful at their jobs. Arlen’s Syndrome toddlers understood – not verbally, but in their limbic systems – when Mommy was worried, when Daddy wanted them to go potty, that Grandma loved them, that a stranger was dangerous.

If his first illegal, off-shore experiments with human germ lines had resulted in deformities, Arlen would have been crucified. There were no deformities. Prospective clients loved the promise of kids who actually understood how parents felt. By six or seven, Arlen’s Syndrome kids could, especially if they were bright, read an astonishing array of non-verbal signals. By nine or ten, it was impossible to lie to them. As long as you were honest and genuinely had their best interests in mind, the children were a joy to live with: sensitive, cooperative, grateful, aware.

And yet here was Belinda Barrington, staring at me from her pale eyes, and I didn’t need a genetic dose of super-empathy to see her glee at embarrassing me. I couldn’t look at Jane. The blood was hot in my face.

Frieda said, sharply and hopelessly, “Belinda, that’s not nice.”

“No, it’s not,” Bridget said. She frowned at her sister, and Belinda actually looked away for a moment. Her twin had some childish control over Belinda, and her mother didn’t. “Tell him you’re sorry.”

“Sorry,” Belinda muttered, unconvincingly. So they could lie, if not be lied to.

Frieda said to Jane, “This is new behavior. I’m sure it’s just a phase. Nothing you’d want to include in your project!”

Belinda shot her mother a look of freezing contempt.

Jane took control of the sorry situation. Sparing me any direct glance, she said to Belinda, “Did anybody tell you why I want to talk to you girls?”

“No,” Belinda said. “You’re not a reporter.”

“I’m a movie actress.”

Bridget brightened. “Like Kylie Kicker?” Apparently Arlen’s Advantage did not confer immunity to inane kiddie pop culture.

“Not as young,” Jane smiled, “or as rich. But I’m making a movie about the lives that girls like you might have when you’re grown up. That’s why I want to get to know you a little bit now. But only if it’s okay with you.”

The twins looked at each other. Neither spoke, but I had the impression that gigabytes passed between them. Frieda said, “Girls, I hope you’ll cooperate with Miss Snow. She—”

“No, you don’t,” Belinda said, almost absently. “You don’t like her. She’s too pretty. But we like her.”

Frieda’s face went a mottled maroon. Bridget, her plump features alarmed, put a hand on her mother’s arm. But Frieda shook it off, started to say something, then abruptly stood and stalked into the house. Bridget made a move to follow but checked herself To me – why? – she said apologetically, “She wants to be alone a little while.”

“You should go with her,” Belinda said, and I didn’t have to be told twice. These kids gave me the creeps.

Not that even they, with their overpraised empathy, could ever understand why.

In the foyer, Suky still lay on the chaise longue with her comic book. There was no sign of her mother. The other chairs were all mammoth leather things, but a low antique bench stood against one wall and I clambered painfully onto it and called a cab. I would have to walk all the way to the front gate to meet it, but the thought of going back in the flyer with Jane was unbearable. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. My back and legs ached, but nothing compared to my heart.

It wasn’t the words Belinda had said. Yes, I loved Jane and yes, that love was hopeless. I already knew that and so must Jane. How could she not? I was with her nearly every day; she was a woman sensitive to nuance. I knew she hated my accidental touch, and hated herself for that, and could help none of it. Three of Jane’s husbands had been among the best-looking men on the planet. Tall, strong, straight-limbed. I had seen Jane’s flesh glow rosy just because James or Karl or Duncan was in the same room with her. I had felt her hide her recoil from me.

“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” How often as a child had I chanted that to myself after another in the endless string of bullies had taunted me? Short Stuff, Dopey, Munchkin, Big Butt, Mighty Midget, Oompa Loompa, cripple. . . . Belinda hadn’t illuminated any new truth for anybody. What she had done was speak it aloud.

“Give sorrow words” – but even Shakespeare could be as wrong as nursery chants. Something unnamed could, just barely, be ignored. Could be kept out of daily interaction, could almost be pretended away. What had been “given words” could not. And now tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, Jane and I would have to try to work together, would avoid each other’s eyes, would each tread the dreary internal treadmill: Is he/she upset? Did I brush too close, stay too far away, give off any hurtful signal . . . For God’s sake, leave me alone!

Speech doesn’t banish distance; it creates it. And if—

“Bitches, aren’t they?” a voice said softly. I opened my eyes. Suky stood close to my bench. She was taller than I’d thought, with a spectacular figure. No one would ever notice, not next to the wonder and novelty of the twins.

In my shamed confusion, I blurted out the first thing that came into my mind. “Belinda is, Bridget isn’t.”

“That’s what you think.” Suky laughed, then laid her comic book on the bench. “You need this, dwarf.” She vanished into some inner corridor.

I picked up the comic. It was holo, those not-inexpensive e-graphics with chips embedded in the paper. Four panels succeeded each other on each page, with every panel dramatizing the plot in ten-second bursts of shifting light. The title was “Knife Hack,” and the story seemed to concern a mother who carves up her infants with a maximum amount of blood and brain spatter.

Arlen’s Syndrome kids: a joy to live with, sensitive and cooperative and grateful and aware.

Just one big happy family.

But sometimes the universe gives you a break. The next day I had a cold. Nothing serious, just a stuffy nose and sore throat, but I sounded like a rusty file scraping on cast iron, so I called in sick to my “office” at Jane’s estate. Her trainer answered. “What?”