The Best of Nancy Kress (18 page)

“I like pretzels,” I say. But John does not give me a pretzel today.

Caroline and I walk in the park. There are many good smells. Caroline sits under a tree. The long fur on her head falls down. She pats my head. She gives me a cookie.

“It’s easy for you, isn’t it, Angel?” Caroline says.

I say, “The words are hard.”

“You like being a dog? A bioenhanced servant dog?”

“The words are hard.”

“Are you happy, Angel?”

“I am happy. I love Caroline.”

She pats my head again. The sun is warm. The smells are good. I close my eyes.

“I love to dance,” Caroline says. “And I hate that I love it.”

I open my eyes. Caroline smells unhappy.

“Goddamn it, I love it anyway. I do. Even though it wasn’t my choice. You didn’t choose what you are, either, did you, Angel? They goddamn made you what they needed you to be. Yet you love it. And for you there’s no account due.”

The words are too hard. I put my nose into Caroline’s front legs. She puts her front legs around me. She holds me tight.

“It’s not
fair
,” Caroline whispers into my fur.

Caroline does not hold me yesterday. She holds me today. I am happy. But Caroline smells unhappy.

Where is my happy if Caroline smells unhappy?

I do not understand.

6.

Deborah didn’t get cast in
Nutcracker
. An SAB teacher told her she might want to consider auditioning for one of the regional companies rather than City Ballet—a death sentence, from her point of view. She told me this quietly, without histrionics, sitting cross-legged on the floor sewing ribbons onto a pair of toe shoes. Not wanting to say the wrong thing, I said nothing, contenting myself with touching her hair, coiled at the nape of her neck into the ballerina bun. Two days later she told me she was dropping out of high school.

“I need the time to dance,” she said. “You just don’t understand, Mom.”

The worst thing I could do was let her make me into the enemy. “I do understand, honey. But there will be lots of time to dance after you finish school. And if you don’t—”

“Finishing is a year away! I can’t afford the time. I have to take more classes, work harder, get asked into the company.
This year
. I’m sorry, Mom, but I just can’t waste my time on all that useless junk in school.”

I locked my hands firmly on my lap. “Well, let’s look at this reasonably. Suppose after all you do get asked to join the company—”

“I
will
be asked! I’ll work so hard they’ll have to ask me!”

“All right. Then you dance with them until, say, you’re thirty-five. At thirty-five you have over half your life left. You saw what happened to Carla Cameri and Maura Jones.” Carla’s hip had disintegrated; Maura’s Achilles tendon had forced her into retirement at thirty-two. Both of them worked in a clothing store, for pitifully small salaries. Dancers didn’t get pensions unless they’d been with the same company for ten years, a rarity in the volatile world of artistic directors with absolute power, who often fired dancers because they were remaking a company into a different “look.”

I pressed my point. “What will you do at thirty or thirty-five with your body debilitated and without even a high school education?”

“I’ll teach. I’ll coach. I’ll go back to school. Oh, Mom, how do I know? That’s decades away! I have to think about what I need to do for my career now!”

No mother love is luminous enough to make a sixteen-year-old see herself at thirty-five.

I said, “No, Deborah. You can’t quit school. I’d have to sign for you, and I won’t.”

“Daddy already did.”

We looked at each other. It was too late; she’d already made me into the enemy. Because she needed one.

She said, in a sudden burst of passion, “You don’t understand! You never felt about your job the way I feel about ballet! You never loved anything enough to give up everything else for it!” She rushed to her room and slammed the door. I put my head in my hands.

After a while, I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
Never loved anything enough to give up everything else for it.

Right.

Pers wasn’t available to yell at. I phoned six times. I left messages on E-mail, even though I had no idea whether he had a terminal. I made the trip out of the protected zone to his apartment. The area was worse than I remembered: glass, broken machinery, shit, drug paraphernalia. The cab driver was clearly eager to leave, but I made him wait while I questioned a kid who came out of Pers’s building. The boy, about eight, had a long pus-encrusted cut down one cheek.

“Do you know when Pers Anders usually comes home? He lives in 2C.”

The kid stared at me, expressionless. The cab driver leaned out and said, “One more minute and I’m leaving, lady.”

I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and held it close to me. “When does Pers Anders usually come home?”

“He moved.”

“Moved?”

“Left his stuff. He say he go someplace better than this shithole. I hear him say it. Don’t you try to prong me, lady. You give me that money.”

“Do you know the address?”

He greeted this with the scorn it deserved. I gave him the money.

Deborah left school and started spending all day and much of the night at Lincoln Center. Finally I walked over to SAB and caught her just before a partnering class. She had twisted a bright scarf around her waist, over her leotard, and her sweaty hair curled in tendrils where it had escaped her bun.

“Deborah, why didn’t you tell me your father had moved?”

She looked wary, wiping her face with a towel to gain time. “I didn’t think you’d care. You hate him.”

“As long as you still visit him, I need to know where he is.”

She considered this. Finally she gave me the address. It was a good one, in the new luxury condos where the old main library had been.

“How can Pers afford
that
?”

“He didn’t say. Maybe he’s got a job. Mom, I have class.”

“Pers is allergic to jobs.”

“Mom, Mr. Privitera is teaching this class
himself
!”

I didn’t stay to watch class. On the way out, I passed Privitera, humming to himself on his way to elate or cast down his temple virgins.

The police had released no new information on the ballerina murders.

I turned in the article on the New York City Ballet. It seemed to me neither good nor bad; everything important about the subject didn’t fit the magazine’s focus. There weren’t too many metaphors. Michael read it without comment. I worked on an article about computerized gambling, and another about holographic TV. I voted in the Presidential election. I bought Christmas presents.

But every free minute, all autumn and early winter, I spent at the magazine library terminals, reading about human bioenhancement, trying to guess what Caroline Olson was having done to herself. What might someday lie in Deborah’s future, if she were as big a fool then as she was being now.

“Don’t get obsessed,” Michael had said.

The literature was hard to interpret. I wasn’t trained in biology, and as far as I could see, the cutting-edge research was chaotic, with various discoveries being reported one month, contradicted the next. All the experiments were carried out in other countries, which meant they were reported in other languages, and I didn’t know how far to trust the biases of the translators. Most of them seemed to be other scientists in the same field. This whole field seemed to me like a canoe rushing toward the falls: nobody in charge, both oars gone, control impossible.

I read about splendid, “revolutionary” advances in biological nanotechnology that always seemed under development, or not quite practical yet, or hotly disputed by people practicing other kinds of revolutionary advances. I read about gene-splicing retroviruses and setting them loose in human organs to accomplish potentially wonderful things. Elimination of disease. Perfect metabolic functioning. Immortality. The studies were always concerned with one small, esoteric facet of scientific work, but the “Conclusions” sections were often grandiose, speculating wildly.

I even picked up hints of experimental work on altering genetic makeup
in vitro
, instead of trying to reshape adult bodies. Some scientists seemed to think this might actually be easier to accomplish. But nowhere in the world was it legal to experiment on an embryo not destined for abortion, an embryo that would go on to become a human being stuck with the results of arbitrary and untested messing around with his basic cellular blueprints. Babies were not tinker toys—or dogs. The Copenhagen Accord, signed twenty-seven years by most technologically civilized countries, had seen to that. The articles on genetic modification
in vitro
were carefully speculative.

But then so was nearly everything else I read. The proof was walking around in inaccessible foreign hospitals, or living anonymously in inaccessible foreign cities—the anonymity of the experimental subjects seemed to be a given, which also made me wonder how many of them were experimental casualties. And if so, of what kind.

Michael wasn’t going to want any article built on this tentative speculation. Lawsuits would loom. But I was beyond caring what Michael wanted.

I learned that the Fifth International Conference on Human Bioenhancement was going to be held in Paris in late April. After paying the Robin Hood, I had no money left for a trip to Paris. Michael would have to pay for it. I would have to give him a reason.

One night in January I did a stupid thing. I went alone to Lincoln Center and waited by the stage door of the New York State Theater. Caroline Olson came out at 11:30, dressed in jeans and parka, accompanied only by a huge black Doberman on the most nominal of leashes. They walked south on Broadway, to an all-night restaurant. I sat myself at the next table.

For the last few months, her reviews had not been good. “A puzzling and disappointing degeneration,” said
The New Yorker
. “Technical sloppiness not associated with either Olson or Privitera,” said
Dance Magazine
. “This girl is in trouble, and Anton Privitera had better find out what kind of trouble and move to correct it,” said the
Times On-Line
.

Caroline ate abstractly, feeding bits to the dog, oblivious to the frowns of a fastidious waiter who was undoubtedly an out-of-work actor. Up close, the illusion of power and beauty I remembered from
Coppelia
evaporated. She looked like just another mildly pretty, self-absorbed, overly thin young woman. Except for the dog, the waiter/actor didn’t give her a second glance.

“We go now?” the dog said.

I choked on my sandwich. Caroline glanced at me absently. “Soon, Angel.”

She went on eating. I left, waited for her, and followed her home. She and the dog lived on Central Park South, a luxury building where the late-night electronic surveillance system greeted them both by name.

I took a cab home. Deborah had never mentioned that the City Ballet prima ballerina was protected by a bioenhanced Doberman. She knew I’d written the story about the ballerina murders. Anton Privitera hadn’t mentioned it, either, in his press conference about dancer safety. I wondered why not. While I was parceling out wonder, I devoted some to the question of City Ballet’s infrequent, superficial, and always-positive bioscans. Shouldn’t a company devoted to the religion of “natural art” be more zealous about ferreting out heretics?