Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

“Still,” said Pierre at last, “there are options. Amniocentesis can determine if a fetus has received two Tay-Sachs genes. If you found that it had, you could have an…” Pierre couldn’t quite bring himself to say “abortion” out loud.

But Shari simply nodded. “I know.” She sniffed a few times. She was quiet for a moment, as if considering whether to go on. “But I’ve got endometriosis; my gynecologist warned me years ago that I’m going to have a very hard time conceiving. I told Howard that when we got serious.

I really, really want to have children, but it’s going to be an uphill battle, and…”

Pierre nodded. And there was no way she could afford to have pregnancies terminated.

“I’m so sorry, Shari, but…” He paused, not sure if it was his place to say anything more.

She looked at him, her face a question.

“You could adopt,” said Pierre. “It’s not so bad. I was raised by someone who wasn’t my biological father.”

Shari blew her nose, but then laughed a cold laugh. “You’re not Jewish.”

It was a statement, not a question.

Pierre shook his head.

She exhaled noisily, as if daunted by the prospect of trying to explain so much. Finally, she said, “Six million Jews were killed during World War II — including most of my parents’ relatives. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been brought up to believe that I’ve got to have children of my own, that I have to do my part to help restore my people.” She looked away.

“You don’t understand.”

Pierre was quiet for a while. Then, at last, he said softly, “I am sorry, Shari.” He did, finally, touch her shoulder. She responded at once, collapsing against his chest, and sobbed softly for a very long time.

Pierre and Molly were sitting side by side on his green-and-orange living-room couch, his arm around her. It had reached the point where they were spending almost every night together, as often at his place as at hers. Molly snuggled her back into the crook of his shoulder. Shafts of amber from the setting sun streamed in through the windows. Pierre had actually vacuumed today, the second time since he’d moved in. The low angle of the sunlight highlighted the paths his Hoover had made.

“Pierre,” Molly said, but then fell silent.

“Hmm?”

“Oh, nothing. I— no, nothing.”

“No, go ahead,” Pierre said, eyebrows raised. “What’s on your mind?”

“The question,” said Molly, slowly, “is more what’s on your mind?”

Pierre frowned. “Eh?”

Molly seemed to be wrestling with whether to go on. Then, all at once, she sat up straight on the couch, took Pierre’s arm from her shoulder, and brought it into her lap, intertwining her fingers with his. “Let’s try a little game. Think of a word — any English word — and I’ll try to guess it.”

Pierre smiled. “Anything at all?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Now concentrate on the word. Con — it’s ‘aardvark.’ ”

“ C’est vrai ,”said Pierre, shocked. “How’d you do that?”

“Try again,” said Molly.

“Okay — I’ve got one.”

“What’s pie — pie-rim-ih-deen? Is that French?”

“How did you do that?”

“What’s that word mean?”

“Pyrimidine. It’s a type of organic base. How did you do that?”

“Let’s try it again.”

Pierre disengaged his hand from hers. “No. Tell me how you did that.”

Molly looked at him. They were sitting so close together that her gaze kept shifting from his left eye to his right. She opened her mouth as if to say something, closed it, then tried again. “I can…” She shut her eyes.

“God, I thought telling you about my stupid bout with gonorrhea was hard. I’ve never told anyone this before.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I can read minds, Pierre.”

Pierre tipped his head to one side. His mouth hung slightly open. He clearly didn’t know what to say.

“It’s true,” said Molly. “I’ve been able to do it since I was thirteen.”

“Okay,” Pierre said, his tone betraying that he felt this was all some trick that could be exposed if enough thought were given to it. “Okay, what am I thinking now?”

“It’s in French; I don’t understand French. Voo — lay — voo… coo, something… The word ‘ moi’ — I know that one.”

“What’s my Canadian Social Insurance number?”

“You’re not thinking about the actual number. I can’t read it unless you’re actually thinking of it.” A pause. “You’re saying the numbers in French. Cinq — that’s five, right? Huit — eight. Deux — two. Um, you’re repeating it to yourself; it’s hard to keep track. Just run through it once.

Cinq huit deux… six un neuf, huit trois neuf .”

“Reading minds is…” He stopped.

“ ‘Not possible’ is what you were about to say.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know.”

Pierre was quiet for a long time, sitting absolutely still. “Do you have to be in physical contact with the person?” he said at last.

“No. But I do have to be close — the person has to be within what I call my ‘zone,’ no more than about three feet away. It’s been very difficult to do any empirical studies, being both the experimenter and the experimental subject, and without revealing to those I’m with what I’m trying to do, but I’d say the — the effect — is governed by the inverse-square law. If I move twice as far away from you, I only hear — if ‘hear’ is the correct word — your thoughts a quarter as… as ‘loudly,’ so to speak.”

“You say ‘hear.’ You don’t see my thoughts? Don’t pick up mental pictures?”

“That’s right. If all you’d done was conjure up an image of an aardvark, I couldn’t have detected it. But when you concentrated on the word ‘aardvark’ I — well, ‘heard’ is as good a word as any — I heard it as clearly as if you’d whispered it in my ear.”

“That’s — incredible.‘’

“You thought about saying ‘amazing,’ but changed your mind as the words were coming out.”

Pierre leaned back into the couch, stunned.

“I can detect what I call ‘articulated thoughts’ — words your brain is using,” said Molly. “I can’t detect images. And emotions — thank God, I can’t pick up emotions.”

Pierre was looking at her with a mixture of astonishment and fascination. “It must be overwhelming.”

Molly nodded. “It can be. But I make a conscious effort not to invade people’s privacy. I’ve been called ‘standoffish’ more than a few times in my life, but it’s quite literally true. I do tend to stand off — to not be too close to people physically, keeping them out of my zone.”

“Reading minds,” said Pierre again, as if repetition would somehow make the idea more palatable. “ Incroyable ,” He shook his head. “Do other members of your family have this — this ability?”

“No. I questioned my sister Jessica about it once, and she thought I was crazy. And my mom — well, there are nights my mom never would have let me go out if she could have read my mind.”

“Why keep it a secret?”

Molly looked at him for a moment, as if she couldn’t believe the question. “I want to live a normal life — as normal as possible, anyway. I don’t want to be studied, or turned into a sideshow attraction, or God forbid, asked to work for the CIA or anything like that.”

“And you say you’ve never told anyone before?”

She shook her head. “Never.”

“But you’re telling me?”

She sought out his eyes. “Yes.”