The Best of Nancy Kress (20 page)

From the press talk in the bar I learned that the presentation to not miss was Thursday night by Dr. Gerard Taillebois of the Pasteur Research Institute, in conjunction with Dr. Greta Erbland of Steckel und Osterhoff. This pairing of a major research facility with a commercial biotech firm was common in Europe. Sometimes the addition of a hospital made it a triumvirate. A hand-written addendum on the program showed that the presentation had been moved from the Napoleon Room to the Grand Ballroom. I checked out the room; it was approximately the size of an airplane hangar. Hotel employees were setting up acres of chairs.

I asked a garçon to point out Dr. Taillebois to me. He was a tall, bald man in his sixties or seventies who looked like he hadn’t slept or eaten in days.

Wednesday night I went to the Paris Opera Ballet. The wet pavement in front of the Opera House gleamed like black patent leather. Patrons dripped jewels and fur. This gala was why Michael had funded my trip; my first ballet article for
New York Now
had proved popular, despite its vapidity. Or maybe because of it. Tonight the famous French company was dancing an eclectic program, with guest artists from the Royal Ballet and the Kirov. Michael wanted 5,000 words on the oldest ballet company in the world.

I watched bioenhanced British dancers perform the wedding
pas de deux
from
Sleeping Beauty
, with its famous fish dives; Danish soloists in twentieth-century dances by Georges Balanchine; French ballerinas in contemporary works by their brilliant choreographer Louis Dufort. All of them were breathtaking. In the new ballets, especially choreographed for these bioenhanced bodies, the dancers executed sustained movements no natural body would have been capable of making at all, at a speed that never looked machine-like. Instead the dancers were flashes of light: lasers, optic signals, nerve impulses surging across the stage and triggering pleasure centers in the brains of the delighted audience.

I gaped at one
pas de trois
in which the male dancer lifted two women at once, holding them aloft in swallow lifts over his head, one on each palm, then turning them slowly for a full ninety seconds. It wasn’t a bench-pressing stunt. It was the culmination of a yearning, lyrical dance, as tender as any in the great nineteenth-century ballets. The female dancers were lowered slowly to the floor, and they both flowed through a
fouette of adage
as if they hadn’t any bones.

Not one dancer had been replaced in the evening’s program due to injury. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a performance of the New York City Ballet without a last-minute substitution.

During intermission, profoundly depressed, I bought a glass of wine in the lobby. The eddying crowd receded for a moment, and I was face to face with Anna Olson, seated regally in her powerchair and flanked by her bodyguards. Holding tight to her hand was a little girl of five or six, dressed in a pink party dress and pink tights, with wide blue eyes, black hair, and a long slim neck. She might have been Caroline Olson twenty years ago.

“Ms. Olson,” I said.

She looked at me coldly, without recognition.

“I’m Susan Matthews. We met at the private reception for Anton Privitera at Georgette Allen’s,” I lied.

“Yes?” she said, but her eyes raked me. My dress wasn’t the sort that turned up at the private fundraisers of New York billionaires. I didn’t give her a chance to cut me.

“This must be your—” granddaughter? Caroline, an only child, had never interrupted her dancing career for pregnancy. Niece? Grandniece? “—your ward.”

“Je m’appelle Marguerite,” the child said eagerly. “Nous regardons le ballet.”

“Do you study ballet, Marguerite?”

“Mais oui!” she said scornfully, but Anna Olson made a sign and the bodyguards deftly cut me off from both of them. By maneuvering around the edge of the hall, I caught a last, distant glimpse of Marguerite. She waited patiently in line to go back to her seat. Her small feet in pink ballet slippers turned out in a perfect fifth position.

Thursday afternoon I drove into Paris to rent an electronic translator for the presentation by Taillebois and Erbland. The translators furnished by the conference were long since claimed. People who had rented them for the opening talks simply hung onto them, afraid to miss anything. The Taillebois/Erbland presentation would include written handouts in French, English, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, but not until the session was over. I was afraid to miss anything, either.

I couldn’t find an electronic translator with a brand name I trusted. I settled for a human named Jean-Paul, from a highly recommended commercial agency. He was about four feet ten, with sad brown eyes and a face wrinkled into fantastic crevasses. He told me he had translated for Charles de Gaulle during the crisis in Algeria. I believed him. He looked older than God.

We drove back to Neuilly in the rain. I said, “Jean-Paul, do you like ballet?”

“Non,” he said immediately. “It is too slippery an art for me.”

“Slippery?”

“Nothing is real. Girls are spirits of the dead, or joyous peasants, or other silly things. Have you ever seen any real peasants, Mademoiselle? They are not joyous. And girls lighter than air land on stage with a thump!” He illustrated by smacking the dashboard with his palm. “Men die of love for those women. Nobody dies for love. They die for money, or hate, but not love. Non.”

“But isn’t all art no more than illusion?”

He shrugged. “Not all illusion is worth creating. Not silly illusions. Dancers wobbling on tippy toes…non, non.”

I said carefully, “French dancers can be openly bioenhanced. Not like in the United States. To some of us, that gives the art a whole new excitement. Technical, if not artistic.”

Jean-Paul shrugged again. “Anybody can be bioenhanced, if they have the money. Bioenhancement, by itself it does not impress me. My grandson is bioenhanced.”

“What does he do?”

Jean-Paul twisted his body toward me in the seat of the car. “He is a soccer player! One of the best in the world! If you followed the sport, you would know his name. Claude Despreaux. Soccer—now
there
is illusion worth creating!”

His tone was exactly Anton Privitera’s, talking about ballet.

Thursday evening, just before the presentation, I finally caught Deborah at home. Her face on the phonevid was drawn and strained. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mom. How’s Paris?”

“Wet. Deborah, you’re not telling me the truth.”

“Everything’s fine! I just…just had a complicated rehearsal today.”

The corps de ballet does not usually demand complicated rehearsals. The function of the corps is to move gracefully behind the soloists and principal dancers; it’s seldom allowed to do anything that will distract from their virtuosity. I said carefully, “Are you injured?”

“No, of course not. Look, I have to go.”

“Deborah…”

“They’re waiting for me!” The screen went blank.

Who was waiting for her? 

When I called back, there was no answer.

I went to the Grand Ballroom. Jean-Paul had been holding both our seats, lousy ones, since noon. An hour later, the presentation still had not started.

The audience fidgeted, tense and muttering. Finally a woman dressed in a severe suit entered. She spoke German. Jean-Paul translated into my ear.

“Good evening. I am Katya Waggenschauser. I have an announcement before we begin. I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. Dr. Taillebois…He…” Abruptly she ran off the stage.

The muttering rose to an astonished roar.

A man walked on stage. The crowd quieted immediately. Jean-Paul translated from the French, “I am Dr. Valois of the Pasteur Institute. Shortly Dr. Erbland will begin the presentation. But I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. There has been an unfortunate accident. Dr. Taillebois is dead.”

The murmuring rose, fell again. I heard reporters whispering into camphones in six languages.

“In a few moments Dr. Erbland will make her and Dr. Taillebois’s presentation. Please be patient just a few moments longer.”

Eventually someone introduced Dr. Erbland, a long and fulsome introduction, and she walked onto the stage. A thin, tall woman in her sixties, she looked shaken and pale. She opened by speaking about how various kinds of bioenhancement differed from each other in intent, procedure, and biological mechanism. Most bioenhancements were introduced into an adult body that had already finished growing. A few, usually aimed at correcting hereditary problems, were carried out on infants. Those procedures were somewhat closer to the kinds of genetic re-engineering—it was not referred to merely as “bioenhancement”—that produced new strains of animals. And as with animals, science had long known that it was possible to manipulate pre-embryonic human genes in the same way,
in vitro
.

The audience grew completely quiet.

In vitro
work, Dr. Erbland said, offered by its nature fewer guides and guarantees. There were much coded redundancies in genetic information, and that made it difficult to determine long-term happenings. The human genome map, the basis of all embryonic re-engineering, had been complete for forty years, but “complete” was not the same as “understood.” The body had many genetic behaviors that researchers were only just beginning to understand. No one could have expected that when embryonic re-engineering first began, as a highly experimental undertaking, that genetic identity would be so stubborn.

Stubborn? I didn’t know what she meant. Apparently, neither did anybody else in the audience. People scarcely breathed.

This experimental nature of embryonic manipulation in humans did not, of course, stop experimentation, Dr. Erbland continued. Before such experimentation was declared illegal by the Copenhagen Accord, many laboratories around the world had advanced science with the cooperation of voluntary subjects. Completely voluntary, she said. She said it three times.

I wondered how an embryo volunteered.

These voluntary subjects had been re-engineered using variants of the same techniques that produced
in vitro
bioenhancements in other mammals. Her company, in conjunction with the Pasteur Research Institute, had been pioneers in the new techniques. For over thirty years.

Thirty years. My search of the literature had found nothing going back that far. At least not those available on the standard scientific nets. If such “re-engineered” embryos had been allowed to fully gestate, and had survived, they were just barely within the cut-off date for legal existence. Were we talking about embryos or people here?

Dr. Erblans made a curious gesture: raising both arms from the elbow, then letting them fall. It looked almost like a plea. Was she making a public confession of breaking international law? Why would she do that?

Over such a long time, Dr. Erblans continued, the human genetic identity, encoded in “jumping genes” in many unsuspected redundant ways, reasserted itself. This was the subject of her and Dr. Taillebois’s work. Unfortunately, the effect on the organism—completely unanticipated by anyone—could be biologically devastating. This first graphic showed basal DNA changes in a re-engineered embryo created twenty-five years ago. The subject, a male, was —

A holograph projected a complicated, three-dimensional genemap. The scientists in the audience leaned forward intently. The non-scientists looked at each other.

As the presentation progressed, anchored in graphs and formulas and genemap holos, it became clear even to me what Dr. Erbland was actually saying.

European geneticists had been experimenting on embryos as long as thirty years ago, and never stopped. They’d allowed some of those embryos to become people. Against international law, and without knowing the long-term effects. And now the long-term effects, like old bills, were coming due, and those people’s bodies were destroying themselves at the genetic level.

We had engineered a bioenhanced cancer to replace the natural one we had conquered.

It was a few moments before I noticed that Jean-Paul had stopped translating. He sat like stone, his wrinkled face lengthened in sorrow.

The audience forgot this was a scientific conference. “How many people have been re-engineered at an embryonic level?” someone shouted in English. “Total number worldwide!”

Someone else shouted, “Y todos van a morir?”

“Les lois internationales—”

“Der sagt—”

Dr. Erbland broke into a long, passionate speech, clearly not part of the prepared presentation. I caught the word “sagt” several times:
law
. I remembered that Dr. Erblans worked for a commercial biotech firm wholly owned by a pharmaceutical company.

The same company in which Anna Olson owned a fortune in stock.

Jean-Paul said quietly, “My grandson. Claude. He was one of those embryos. They told us it was safe…”

I looked at the old man, slumped forward, and I couldn’t find any sympathy for him. That appalled me. A cherished grandson…But they had agreed, Claude’s parents, to roulette with a child’s life. In order to produce a superior soccer player.
“Soccer—now there is an illusion worth creating.”