The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (106 page)

But we, of course, knew. Ethan would be a dwarf We engineered him to be a dwarf. Then he was born and scanned.

A twentieth-century religious writer once said that humanity needs the disabled to remind us of the fragility of health, and of “the power of life and its brokenness.” The nineteenth-century mother of the famous Colonel Tom Thumb attributed her son’s dwarfism to her grief over the death of the family dog during her pregnancy. Leila and I had no such spiritual consolations, no such explanations for Ethan’s lack of dwarfism. The ones that science could offer were vague: Engineering fails. Genes jump. Chromosomes mutate. Accidents happen. Nature assets herself.

I bought the mountain cabin just after Leila left me. I think now that I wasn’t quite sane during that awful time. I’d retired from politics and hadn’t yet entered show-business management. I had nothing to do. There are notebooks I wrote then in which I talk about suicide, but I have no memory of doing the writing or thinking the thoughts. Eventually, that time passed. I left the cabin and never went back. Years later I deeded it over to Leila, who would go there sometimes with Ethan when he was small. She told me once, in a rare lapse into civility, that Ethan was happy at the cabin. He chased butterflies, hunted rocks, picked wildflowers. He calmed down up there, and he slept well in the sweet mountain air.

Now the twins did the same, falling asleep on the back seat of the Lexus. Still Jane and I didn’t talk. But once she put her hand on the back of my neck. That was a gesture I’d dreamed about, longed for, would have given ten years of my life for. But not like this. Her touch wasn’t sexual, wasn’t romantic.

It was motherly.

We pulled up to the cabin just as the sun rose over the mountains, an hour before The Group was scheduled to break its story. Jane’s skin goose-fleshed as she opened the car door and the cold dawn air rushed in.

“I’m going to carry them inside,” she said, the first words she’d spoken in an hour. “They need their sleep. Is the door locked?”

“I have the key.”

Mundane words, normal words. While below us, the human race was about to be altered at its core.

The cabin, too, was cold. I started the generator – quicker than building a fire – while Jane, puffing a little, carried the girls one at a time into the bedroom. The cabin is small but it’s not primitive or austere; I’m not a fan of either. It has a main room with running water from a deep well, a comfortable bedroom, and a bathroom with full septic system. The original furniture had been sized for me, but evidently Leila had replaced it all. The sofa was hard to climb onto. My legs hurt.

Jane emerged from the bedroom after depositing the last twin, closed the door, and sat down on a wing chair across from me. She said quietly, “You could have let me drive.”

I didn’t answer.

“Is there a radio here?”

“There was. A satellite radio, the mountains don’t permit much other reception.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here for a long time.”

She got up and began opening cupboards in the kitchenette. The counters and appliances, like the furniture, had been replaced, but no new cabinets built above them. Jane had to squat to peer into shelves. She searched the two closets, one of which had not existed when I owned the cabin, then sat down again. “No radio. But a lot of food and equipment. Who uses this place?”

Again I didn’t answer.

“Barry, what’s our plan?”

I looked at her then. No make-up, barely combed hair, huddled inside jeans and a green sweater that matched her eyes. She had never looked more beautiful to me.

“My only plan was to get you away before some angry mob came after you. People aren’t going to like that their brains have been fucked with, and you’re a natural target, Jane.”

“I know.” She smiled wanly. “I always have been, for anybody with a grudge. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because the perception is that you have it all.” I meant: beauty, talent, success, riches. I meant: my heart.

She snorted. “Oh, right. I have a burnt-out career, four bad marriages, and wrinkles that Botox can’t touch. Barry, dear, you look tired. Why don’t you lie on the sofa and I’ll make you some warm milk.”

“Don’t mother me!” It came out a snarl.

She looked startled, then angry, then compassionate. Compassionate was the worst. “I only meant—”

“That’s not you talking, it’s the genemod that The Group infected you with.”

She turned thoughtful, considering this. Contrary to Ms Resentful’s perception, Jane was not stupid. Finally she said, “No, I don’t think so, because I think I would have reacted the same way even before all this started. If I saw you tired and discouraged, I’d have offered some comfort anyway.”

This was true. All at once I saw that this was going to be more complicated than I thought. How could anybody determine which behavior was caused by increased oxytorin receptors, and which was innate? It was the old argument, genes versus free will, only now it was about to turn incendiary.

Jane said, “I’m making you that warm milk.”

But I was asleep before she could bring it to me.

I woke to Belinda standing beside the sofa, staring at me flatly. “I want to go home.”

Groggily I sat up. Everything hurt. “Where’s Jane?”

“Her and Bridget went for a stupid walk. Take me home.”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“I want to go home.”

Painfully I climbed off the sofa and headed to the kitchenette. There was fresh coffee in a Braun on the counter, but I couldn’t reach it. Hating every second that Belinda watched me, I dragged a footstool from the fireplace to the counter and hoisted myself onto it. A part of my brain noticed dispassionately that I felt no nurturing impulses toward Belinda when she didn’t look more helpless than I felt.

The coffee was hot and rich. Good coffee had always been important to Leila. I gulped it down and said, “How long ago did they leave on this walk?”

“I don’t know.”

She probably did know and wasn’t telling me, the brat.

“I really don’t know, so stop thinking I’m a liar.”

How did she do it? I’d read the literature on Arlen’s Syndrome. Subconscious processes in Belinda’s malevolent little brain were hypersensitive to six non-word signals: gesture and facial expression, even very tiny movements in either. Rhythm of movement. Bodily use of space. Objectics, such as dress and hairstyle. And what was called paralanguage: tone of voice, rate of verbal delivery, emphasis and inflection. Taken together, they let her read my emotions like a Teleprompter, but she was not reading my mind. I had to remind myself of that. Nonetheless, for the first time I saw the rationale for burning witches at the stake.

She said, “I don’t care if you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Belinda.” Said hopelessly; I couldn’t hide from her.

“I hate you, too.”

I took my coffee outside. Leila hadn’t removed the low bench in front of the cabin, from which there was a breath-taking panorama of mountains and valleys, a pristine Eden that, when I’d lived here those nine months, had filled me with despair. Eden is no longer Eden if you’ve been exiled from it. The ghost of those bad feelings seemed to linger around the bench, but I didn’t go back inside. Presently Jane and Bridget came puffing up the dirt road, Bridget clutching a mess of buttercups and daisies.

“Hi, Barry,” the child said unhappily. She’d been crying. Immediately I braced myself and there it was: the soft desire to reassure her, help her, kiss the boo-boo and make it all better.

God damn it to hell.

Jane sat on the bench beside me. “Go put the flowers in water, Bridget.”

When she’d gone, I said, “We need to know what’s happening in LA. There’s a library in Dunhill, at the base of the mountain. If you wrap up your hair and wear sunglasses and – oh, I don’t know, act – do you think you can go in there unnoticed and use the Link? I know I can’t.”

She looked at the mountain road, which has no guard rails and, in places, pretty steep fall-offs. Jane doesn’t like heights. She said, “Yes. I can do it.”

“Don’t stay long, and don’t talk to anybody. Not one word. Your voice is memorable.”

“Only if you’d heard it more recently than ten years ago. And in a better picture than my last one. Should I go now?” Again she looked at the road.

Before I could answer, the twins started shouting inside the cabin. Jane rose to her feet as the girls raced outside. Bridget cried, “Belinda, don’t!”

Belinda said, “If you don’t take us home this very minute, I’m going to tell everybody that you touched me in my private place and you’ll go to jail forever and ever and ever!”

“No, you will not, young lady,” Jane said severely. “You just come inside with me this very minute.”

Belinda looked astonished. Probably Frieda had never spoken to her daughter that way. I reflected that “maternal behavior” could include discipline. Belinda followed Jane inside.

Had Frieda felt too intimidated by her daughters to reprimand them? Too proud? Too guilty? Had she been too terrified of what they might in turn say to her? I could imagine any of those scenarios, with a child so different from you, so strange, so eerily knowing.

What kind of discipline had Leila given, or not given, to Ethan?

Jane returned from Dunhill in a state of restrained anxiety. Nobody, she said, had recognized her at the library. She’d accessed the Link, watched the news, hardcopied the headlines. It was all even worse than I’d expected.

“They’re calling it treason,” Jane said.

“It is treason. Or something.” Bioweapon terrorism. Invasion of bodily privacy. Violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Medical malpractice.

“What next, Barry?”

“I’m not sure. I need to think.” But all I could think about was what might have happened if I hadn’t gotten Jane away, if Ms Resentful hadn’t called me. Riots cause death of four. And that was without the rioters’ zeroing in on a specific target.

“What did the twins do while I was gone?”

“Nothing.” They’d played inside and I’d sat outside, pretending they weren’t there. Jane went into the cabin.

A minute later she was back. “They’re making cookies.”

“Fine. Just so long as they don’t burn down the cabin.”

“We won’t,” Bridget said, and there they were beside us, having silently followed Jane. Belinda had a picturesque smudge of chocolate on her nose. I did not think that she looked adorable. Bridget added, “Why are you scared, Jane?”

Jane knew better than to deny. “I went down to a town where I could get the news, and some people in LA are very angry at another group of people there. It could get violent.”

Belinda said, “But why does that mean we can’t go home?”

Bridget said, “They’re mad at us, too, aren’t they? You’re scared for us. Why? We didn’t do anything!”

Belinda said, “Don’t be stupid, Brid. People get mad at us all the time when we didn’t do anything.” She looked at me. “Like Barry is mad at us.”

Bridget scowled, making her suddenly look more like her sister. “Yeah. Why are you mad at us, Barry?”

“Because I didn’t want to have to bring you here. But if I hadn’t, you might both have been attacked by a mob now.”

Bridget looked scared, but Belinda said, “Naw, we got really good security at home. Nobody can get through. I want to go home!”

“And I want you to,” I said, which was nothing less than total truth – even as I felt the treacherous desire to comfort little frightened Bridget . . . oxytorin.

Belinda did not look frightened. She was working up to a towering tantrum. “Then take us home! Take us home now!”

Jane said soothingly, “We can’t, Belinda. It’s not safe. The—”

“It is safe! Daddy’s estate is safe! I want to go home!”

Bridget said, with heart-breaking hopelessness, “Belinda—”

Belinda kicked her sister, who screamed and fell to the ground. Then she kicked Jane, who made a grab for her. Belinda was quicker, squirming away, tears of rage on her grimy face.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me! I hate you, you go around feeling sorry for everybody who isn’t you! You feel sorry for Barry ’cause he’s all twisted and short, and you feel sorry for Brid and me ’cause you think we’re so different, just like you feel sorry for Catalina and the pilot and everybody who’s not pretty like you! Well, you’re not so pretty anymore either, ’cause you’re old and you know it and you’re scared nobody’s going to like you anymore if you’re not pretty and if you don’t do that fucking movie about us! And you know what – you’re right! Nobody will like you just like I hate you! ’Cause you’re old and not pretty any more and you’ll be alone all the rest of your life! And—”

Jane stood still, looking dazed. Looking stripped naked. But now Bridget was up off the ground and barreling into her sister head first, a battering ram to the belly. “Don’t you kick me!”