“Christ, why do you have to treat me as a Shalmaneser-surrogate? That’s the trouble with you corporation zecks—you trade your faculty of independent judgment against a bag of cachet and a fat salary. Mind if I help myself to a drink?”
Norman started. He pointed mutely at the liquor console, but Chad was already there scanning the dials.
“I saw some of the effect right there at the party,” Donald said. He wanted to shiver, but the muscles of his back refused to respond to the urge. “There was a man—doesn’t matter who. I read his lips. He was saying something about a girl he’d lost because he wasn’t allowed to be a father.”
“You can multiply him by a million as a start,” Chad said, raising a whistler from the console’s outlet. “Maybe a lot more. Though that party was hardly a fair sample. The sort of people who go to such romps are on average too selfish to make parents.”
He poured the whistler down his throat in a single gulp, nodded approval at the impact it made, and dialled another.
“Just a second,” Elihu put in. “Mostly, people talk as though it’s the parents who are the selfish ones. And this alarms me. I mean, I can see how having three, four or more children could be regarded as selfish. But two, which only maintains a balance—”
“It’s classic economic jealousy,” Chad said with a shrug. “Any society which gives lip-service to the idea of equal opportunity is going to generate jealousy of others who are better off than you are, even if the thing that’s in short supply can’t be carved up and shared without destroying it. When I was a cub the basis for this resentment was relative intelligence. I recall some people back in Tulsa who spread slanderous gossip about my parents for no better reason than that my sister and I were way ahead of all the other pupils in our school. Now the scarcity item is prodgies themselves. So two things happen: people who’ve been barred by a eugenics board, feeling they’ve been unjustly deprived, hide their sour-grapes pose behind a mask of self-righteousness—and a lot of people who can’t face the responsibility of raising prodgies seize on this as an excuse to copy them.”
“I have a grown son,” Elihu said after a moment. “I expect to be a grandfather in a year or two. I haven’t felt this effect you’re talking about.”
“Nor have I, on the personal level, but that’s mainly because I don’t like to choose my friends among the kind of people who react that way. Mark you, I’m not much of a father except in the biological sense—my marriage caved in. Also my books act as a splendid surrogate for the basic function children perform for their parents.”
“Which is?” Norman demanded in a faintly hostile tone.
“Temporal extension of personal influence over the environment. Children are a pipeline into the posthumous future. So are books, works of art, notoriety and sundry other alternatives. But you can’t have a score of millions of frustrated parents using authorship to sublimate their problems. Who’d be their audience?”
“As far as I’m aware I have no desire for children,” Norman said challengingly. “Despite my religion! A lot of Aframs feel the way I do because our prodgies would be raised in what remains a foreign and intolerant setting!”
“Oh, someone like you acts as his own child-surrogate,” Chad grunted. “You’re too sheeting busy making yourself over in a preconceived image to want to spend time licking a cub into shape as well.”
Norman rose half out of his chair, an indignant retort on his lips. With it still unuttered he contrived to turn the movement into reaching for a reefer from the box on the nearest table.
He said, more to himself than the others, “Prophet’s beard, I hardly know who I am any more, so…”
Donald repressed an exclamation at hearing his own predicament so patly echoed. But before he could speak, Elihu had put another question to Chad.
“Granting you’re right, what’s going to happen if this breakthrough in Yatakang takes away the excuse for forbidding parenthood on eugenic grounds? I mean, if you can have a healthy, normal child even if genetically it isn’t yours, it’s one step closer to the natural process than adoption, and I know dozens of people who’ve adopted and been apparently quite satisfied.”
“Why don’t you ask Shalmaneser? Sorry, Elihu—didn’t mean to snap. It’s just that I really have decided to give up trying to keep track of the human race. Some of our behaviour is so unbelievably irrational…” Chad rubbed tired eyes with his knuckles. “Sorry,” he said again. “I can make a guess. There’s going to be trouble. Come to think of it, that’s a safe catch-all prophecy. Whatever happens in present circumstances there’s going to be trouble. But if you want to know what an expert thinks, why don’t you ask Don, not me? You have a degree in biology or something, don’t you?” he concluded, addressing Donald directly.
“Yes, that’s right.” Donald licked his lips, resenting having been drawn into the conversation when all he wanted to do was sit and be miserable on his own. For the sake of politeness he tried to order his thoughts.
“Well … Well, there’s nothing radically new about the first half of the Yatakangi programme, if what the man at the party said was correct. The techniques for optimising your population by ensuring only children of good heredity get born have existed for decades—you could even say for centuries, because if all you want to do is select, you can do it by conventional breeding methods. But I assume they’re talking about something more ambitious. Even so, you can donate semen, you can reimplant an externally fertilised ovum if it’s the mother’s heredity that’s at fault rather than the father’s—the hole, that’s available as a commercial service right here in this country! It’s expensive, and sometimes it takes three or four attempts because the ovum is very fragile, but it’s been being done for years. And if you’re prepared to stand the cost of missing a dozen launch windows before the tectogeneticists achieve a viable nucleus, you can even have a parthenogenetic embryo—a clone, as they call it. There isn’t anything so new in this claim from Yatakang.”
There was a pause. Norman said at length, “But the second stage, the bit about deliberately modifying the children into supermen…?”
“Wait a minute,” Chad cut in. “Donald, you’re wrong. It seems to me there are two very new factors involved even before you get on to the point Norman just raised. First off, a scarcity product is suddenly not going to be scarce any more. You can’t carve up and distribute fair shares of the available healthy prodgies, though people have been trying to do exactly that, by forming these clubs you keep running into which give non-parents a night or two a week to look after other members’ prodgies. What’s the population of Yatakang, though—something over two hundred million isn’t it? There’s no question of scarcity if the government intends to carry out its promise on that scale.
“And the second new factor, which is even more important, is this: somebody else has got it first.”
He let the words lie heavy in the air like a haze of smoke for long seconds before he gulped the last of his drink and gave a sigh.
“Well, I’d better go find a hotel, I guess. If I’m coming back from the gutter to join the merrymaking on the eve of Ragnarök I might as well go the whole hog. Find myself an apt tomorrow, load it with all the goodies people go for nowadays … Anyone know a good interior decorator I could call up and tell to get on with the job without bothering me?”
“Where have you been living, then?” Norman demanded. “Oh—the hole. I didn’t mean to be inquisitive.”
“I haven’t been living anywhere. I’ve been sleeping on the street. Want to see my permit?” Chad reached inside his fancy-dress suit and produced his greasy billfold. “There!” he added, extracting a card. “This is to certify—etcetera. And the hole with it.”
He stuffed the billfold back in his pocket and tore the permit into four pieces.
The others exchanged glances. Elihu said, “I didn’t realise you’d carried your policy of opting out quite that far.”
“Opting out? There’s only one way to do that, t
he same as throughout history: you kill yourself. I thought I could resign from society. The hole I could! Man’s a gregarious animal—not very social, but damnably gregarious—and the mass simply won’t let the individual cut loose, even if the bonds are no more than police permits for sleeping rough. So I came back, and here I am in this idiotic outfit of grandfather’s clothes, and…”
He scowled and threw the scraps of card at a disposall. One of them missed and fluttered to rest on the carpet like a dying moth.
“I could fix you a room at the UN Hostel,” Elihu suggested. “The accommodation is basic, but it’s convenient and cheap.”
“Cheap doesn’t bother me. I’m a multimillionaire.”
“What?” Norman exclaimed.
“Sure—thanks to the bleeders who bought my books and refused to act on what I said in them. They’re set in college courses, they’re translated into forty-four languages … I’m going to spend some of this credit for a change!”
“Well, in that case…” Norman let the words die away.
“What were you going to say?”
“I was going to say you were welcome to spread your tatami here,” Norman explained. “Assuming Donald doesn’t mind. I don’t know how soon they’ll be sending me to Beninia, but I’m bound to be away a fairly long time. And—ah—I’d count it a privilege to have you as a guest.” He sounded uncomfortable.
“Chad can have my room as of tomorrow night,” Donald said, and thought too late of the shiny spike he had been shown, hidden under the Hille chair.
But the hole with that.
Norman turned to him incredulously. “What happened? What decided you to leave?”
“I’ve been told to,” Donald said.
What will they do to me for this? I don’t know. I don’t care.
He leaned his head back and sleep came while his eyelids were still sliding down.
tracking with closeups (13)
THE GOOSEBERRY BUSH
Fat, black-haired, slightly sallow, with a big red mouth and bright dark eyes, Olive Almeiro looked the very model of a peasant materfamilias, except that her arms were weighed down by bracelets of emeralds and diamonds. The image of motherhood was part of her stock-in-trade. In fact she had never even married, let alone borne children.
Nonetheless, she insisted on her staff calling her “señora” rather than “señorita”, and in a sense she was entitled to the aura of maternity. She had stood proxy-mother, so to speak, to more than two thousand adoptees.
They had provided her with her floating home, the yacht Santa Virgen (a name from which she derived wry amusement); with the office-building she owned and operated from; with an international reputation; with all the comfort she could buy and a second fortune in reserve to purchase more.
It was just as well they had done all this before today.
Her office, windowed on all four sides, was decorated with dolls from every period of history: ancient Egyptian clay animals, Amerind toys of knotted and coloured straw, carved wooden manikins from the Black Forest, velvet teddy-bears, Chinese figurines made from scraps of priceless silk …
Imprisoned behind glass, too precious to be touched by the fingers of a child.
She said to the phone, staring out across the blue morning waters of the ocean, “What’s it going to do to us?”
A distant voice said it was too soon to tell.
“Well, work it out and do it fast! As if the trouble we’re having with the dichromatism bit wasn’t enough, these bleeders in Yatakang have to—ah, never mind. I guess we could always move to Brazil!”
She cut the connection with a furious gesture and leaned back in her polychair, swivelling it so that instead of the calm blue sea she faced the teeming city on the landward side.
After a while she pressed an intercom switch. She said, “I’ve made up my mind. Unship the Lucayo twins and the Rosso boy that they sent from Port-au-Prince. Before we dispose of them they’ll eat as much as we can make in profits.”
“What do you want us to do with them then, señora?” asked the voice from the intercom.
“Leave ’em on the steps of the cathedral—put ’em out to sea in a basket—why should I have to tell you what to do, so long as you unship them?”
“But, señora—”
“Do as I say or you’ll be out to sea in a basket yourself.”
“Very well, señora. It’s only that there’s this Yanqui couple who want to see you, and I thought perhaps…”
“Oh yes. Tell me about them.”
She listened, and within the minute had summed them up. Doubtless having given up everything at home—their jobs, their apt, their friends—for the sake of a legal conception in Puerto Rico, they had been cornered by the J-but-O State’s unexpected ratification of the dichromatism law and were now driven back to considering adoption, which they could have arranged without leaving the mainland.
I’m sick of them. The brown-noses are the worst, lording it over us spics when our ancestors came here as conquerors and theirs came as slaves, but just about any Yanqui gives me morning-sickness.
The silent joke lightened her mood enough to permit her to say, “All right, send them in. And what did you say was the name?”
“Potter,” said the intercom.
They came in holding hands, and stared at her covertly while settling in the chairs she waved them to. One could almost hear the mental comment: “so this is the famous Olive Almeiro!” After a while, the wife’s attention wandered to the display of dolls, and the husband cleared his throat.
“Señora Almeiro, we—”
“You got caught with your pants down,” Olive cut in.
Frank Potter blinked. “I don’t quite—”
“You don’t imagine you’re unique, do you? What’s your trouble—colour-blindness?”
“That’s right. And my wife is sure to pass it on, so—”
“So you decided to migrate and because Nevada is expensive and Louisiana doesn’t like being used as a conception refuge you chose Puerto Rico and the legislature shot your ship out from under. What do you want me to do about it?”
Taken aback by the baby-farmer’s curtness, Frank exchanged glances with his wife, who was very pale.
“It was on the spur of the moment,” he admitted. “We thought you might be in a position to help us.”
“To adopt? I doubt it. If you are willing to consider adoption you need have moved no further from New York than New Jersey.” Olive fingered her jowl. “You probably want me to disguise a child of your own as an adoptee. It’s already on the way, isn’t it?”
Frank flushed to the roots of his hair. He said, “How could you possibly—?”
“I told you you’re not unique. Was it intentional?”
“I guess so.” He stared at the floor, miserably. “We decided to celebrate our decision to move, you see. But we didn’t realise it had happened so quickly. We didn’t find out until we’d arrived here.”
“They didn’t spot it at Immigration? No, come to think of it, they only check women arriving from abroad and from the maverick states. In that case you’re already in a cleft stick. Either the prodgy was conceived in New York State where you’d been specifically forbidden to start one, or it was conceived here where transmission of your genes is now illegal, or between the two which makes it a prohibited immigrant the moment it leaves the womb. So…?”
“We thought maybe if we went out of the country altogether,” Sheena whispered.
“And got me to adopt it back in, and reunite you with it?” Olive gave a humourless chuckle. “Yes, I do that sort of thing. For a flat fee of a hundred thousand.”
Frank started. “But that’s far more than—!”
“Than the cost of a regular adoption? Certainly. Adoption is legal, subject to certain conditions. What you’re proposing is not.”
There was silence. Eventually Olive said, having savoured their discomfort, “Well, Mr. Potter, I’d suggest the only solution for you is to start ov
er. I can recommend GT’s line of abortifacients, and I know a doctor who won’t insist on the kind of pregnancy check he’s supposed to carry out before prescribing them. Then I could put you on my regular waiting list. Beyond that I can’t be any help.”
“There must be something else we can do!” Frank almost jumped out of his chair. “We want our own prodgies, not someone else’s second-hand! Over in Yatakang they’ve just announced they can—”
Olive’s face went as hard as marble. She said, “You will oblige me by leaving, Mr. Potter.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” A podgy hand stabbed a button on her desk.
Sheena plucked at her husband’s arm. “She’s an expert, Frank,” she said in a dead voice. “You’ve got to take her word for it.”
“No, this is too much! We came in to make a civil inquiry and—”
“The door behind you is open,” Olive said. “Good morning.”
Sheena turned and headed for the exit. After a moment in which he looked ready to scream with fury, Frank let his shoulders droop and followed her.
* * *
When they had gone, Olive found herself panting from the effort of self-control. She pronounced a curse on the government of Yatakang and felt a little better.
But her hatred was new and raw; like a dressed burn it hurt despite salving.
Over the years she had built up a huge network of necessary contacts, expended a million dollars in bribes, risked prosecution a score of times, secure in the belief that products of contemporary tectogenetic skill such as cloned embryos could never compete with traditional “unskilled labour”. She had begun when only two states, California and New York, had eugenic legislation, and Puerto Rico was full of overburdened mothers with passable genotypes prepared to let a fifth or sixth baby go for adoption to some rich Yanqui. As the eugenics laws spread and grew teeth, as voluntary sterilisation after the third child became commonplace, she developed alternatives. A clean genotype, while still desirable, posed less of a problem than proving the adoptee was an American citizen when for brown-nose parents-to-be it hailed from Haiti, for gringos from Chile or Bolivia.