David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“I… Lupus.”

“Ah yes.” A brief pain flickered in his eyes. He leaned back in his webchair, put hands behind his neck, stretched in the light gravity of the wheel. “I remember those years. That one, we got a clean solution. No side effects—as you so clearly demonstrate. Um. You ever see a really bad case?”

“No. I read—”

“Not the same thing. Under the ’scope the cells aren’t tight little cylinders, y’know—they’re misshapen, meshugenuh, tortured things. The patient’s connective tissue clogs. Swollen joints. Repeated infections. Liver damage, early death. There’d been good detectors to warn parents if a baby had it, sure, but nobody cracked the real problem—the genetic fix-up—until we did. Sorry—until Simon Percell did.”

“You can take a lot of credit.”

He laughed. “My career in the last couple of decades, my dear, has depended on my not taking credit.”

“With us Percells… it’s different.”

He smiled wearily. And warily? she wondered. “You are, Virginia, an expression of how different a map is from the territory.”

She frowned.

“Sorry, I’m being opaque. Habit of mine. We charted all the DNA nucleotides long ago. Knew where everything was—a great map. Only we didn’t know what it meant.”

“My genes don’t carry the lupus—you knew how to do that. And the usual Percell enhancements are effective.”

“Obviously.” A grin.

She felt herself blushing at the compliment, rummaged for something to say. “We have all kinds of advantages…”

“True…” He was still pensive, reflecting on times she could not know. Yet, those days would not die, as long as there were Percells. And that legacy lived in every corridor of this expedition.

He sighed “But not true enough. Sure, we got the hemoglobin disorders, Huntington’s disease, all the easy targets. Just lop off a few molecules. Trimming. Pruning. Change the cryptogram and—presto.”

“I read that there are over two million people who owe you that.”

“Been dipping into the forbidden Percell underground newspapers?” he said with mock seriousness. “Yes, that’s right—you’re from Hawaii. Plenty of pro-Percell sentiment there still, eh? Who passed on your security clearance?”

“I’m so good, they had to let me come,” she said with a proud smirk.

“Bravo!” He applauded. “Bravo, indeed. And you are good—I looked in your file, back when Captain Cruz had me on the recruiting committee.”

“Really?” She was suddenly serious. “What… what’s in there? Did they—”

He waved a hand. “Nothing about your subversive ideas. Not a jot.”

Her eyes widened, her mouth formed a shocked O—and then she saw he was kidding. “Ah… oh.”

“They don’t care if you think Percells are just as good as—what’s the slang? yes—as good as Orthos are, you know.” His voice dropped. “Since they’re all so damned sure you’re not.”

She saw suddenly that she had been right—his pose before others was a mask. “They… do think that, don’t they?”

“I’m afraid so. Many of them, anyway.”

“Even though they let some of us go on this expedition.”

“Let… ” he began, then shook his head. “They had their reasons.”

“But…

“Virginia, has it never occurred to you that getting bright, hardworking, potentially troublemaking Percells out of their hair might be a very attractive idea?”

“Of course.” She frowned.

“And isn’t some side of you glad to be rid of all that krenk… that Earthside bullshit?”

She had to admit he was right. When the Edmund had lifted free of Earth orbit, she had felt…released. “Well…ins some ways.”

“Such as?” He sat forward, apparently genuinely interested. The slanting burnt orange of the Massachusetts sunset struck his bald patch, yet he did not seem old, only wise and kind and quietly powerful.

“Well… my father, he thought I was special. That our family was unique, a kind of historic experiment.”

“Ah. A common mode.”

“I… I hated it.”

“Feeling special?”

“Being… different.”

“You’re not, really.”

“Tell them.”

“Your parents should’ve shielded you from that.”

“They… Listen. When I was eleven, I was the only girl in my class without nylons. So I went to the local Woolworth’s and bought a pair. I had no idea how to hold them up—I got the old kind, by mistake.”

“Your mother…”

“She died when I was ten.”

“Lupus.”

She nodded.

“So you were a tomboy. Surfing, basking in Hawaiian splendor.”

“Yes. It was beautiful, but… Well, my father raised me. I remember one day when I was playing catch in a T-shirt with the boys, I heard some giggles over my bouncing breasts. This was on Maui, where nobody’s especially reluctant to talk about such things. So I went back to Woolworth’s. The saleslady had to explain about bras—I didn’t even know what the sizes meant! Then, in seventh grade, I started wearing skirts instead of jeans, because the other girls were. A boy looked at my hairy legs and said, ‘I’m gonna get you a razor for Christmas:’ I could have died! The next day, I borrowed my father’s razor and cut my left shin so badly I still have the scar.”

“I see.”

She felt suddenly embarrassed. Somehow, all that had come out without her having planned it. “I wasn’t very good at those things. I used to tell myself it was because my mother died and there was no one to tell me. So I concentrated on math, on computers.”

“And if you hadn’t. you could be a perfectly happy housewife somewhere, children yanking on your apronstrings.”

She smiled impishly, crushing a sudden inner pain by old reflex. “To hell with that .”

“Precisely.”

Besides, I didn’t have that option, she thought. “There’s a quid for every quo.” That’s it—cryptic and ironic. Show him I’m not just a simple schoolgirl who became a computer whiz because of adolescent angst.

But Saul’s face had become pensive, his eyes reflecting some inward turning. “I love you all, you know.”

“You…”

His voice was very low. “All the Percells. You… you’re paying for our…”

“Your what?”

“Our sins.”

“But you’re not!Imean, we’re not! I—You did no wrong! It’s others who—”

He waved a hand, silencing her. “I’m sorry. I… sometimes I remember how it used to be. What we hoped for, worked for. That’s all gone now. That’s a major reason I signed on. To run away from a whole host of failures.”

“But you’re not—”

“No, let’s stop. It’s… those days are impossible to forget, but pointless to remember. Better to let them go.”

“Saul, I—I respect you so—”

But he waved his hands energetically in front of his face, banishing all talk. “Tell you what, I’ll get you a refill and… and…”

Abruptly, he turned aside and sneezed.

“Damn! Can’t get rid of this thing.”

“Take an anti.”

“I have.”

Another cross he’ll have to bear, she thought. Living in a snowball, sniffling all the time.

Percells didn’t have to put up with runny noses. The gene tailors, while they were splicing away anemia and lupus and the other target diseases, had trimmed the complex of coding molecules that had given viruses their free ride, and humanity a million years of colds and flu.

“Well then… let me make some tea.”

He smiled wanly, his steel-blue eyes still distant, thinking of something far back in a past she could not fathom “Yes, fine. My mother…she did that. Then came the chicken soup.” He laughed, but not his eyes.