Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

Molly only intended to watch long enough to satisfy herself that it wasn’t going to become violent, and that the woman was a willing participant in the exchange. A few other passersby had stopped to watch as well, although many more were continuing on after gawking for only a moment or two. The woman pulled a ring off her hand. It wasn’t a wedding or engagement ring; it came off the wrong finger. Still, it clearly had been a gift from the man. She threw it at him and stormed away. It bounced off his chest and went flying into the grass.

Molly turned to go, but as the man went to his knees, trying to find the ring, he shouted “ Blyat!” at the departing woman. Molly froze. Her mind flashed back to that long-ago day in San Francisco: the old geezer tormenting the dying cat. The word she’d just heard was precisely what that horrible man had yelled at Molly then.

Molly took off after the woman, who was marching purposefully toward the doors of the nearest building, her head held defiantly high, ignoring the stares of onlookers. The man was still rooting in the grass for the ring.

Molly caught up with the woman just as she was pulling on one of the vertical tubular door handles, polished smooth by the hands of a thousand students each day.

“Are you okay?” asked Molly.

The woman looked at her, face still red with anger, but said nothing.

“I’m Molly Bond. I’m a professor in the psych department. I’m just wondering if you’re okay.”

The woman looked at her for a moment longer, then gestured rith her head toward the man. “Never better,” she said in an iccented voice.

“That your boyfriend?” asked Molly. As she looked, the man rose to his feet, holding the ring high. He glared across the distance at the two of them.

“Was,” said the student. “But I caught him cheating.”

“Are you an international student?”

“From Lithuania. Here to study computers.”

Molly nodded. That was the natural place for their conversation to end.

She knew she should just say, “Well, as long as you’re okay…” and head on her way. But she couldn’t resist; she had to know. She tried to make her tone light, offhand. “He called you ‘ blyat ,’ ”said Molly. “Is that—” and she realized she was about to look like an ignoramus. Was there such a language as Lithuanian? Her Midwestern upbringing had left a few things to be desired. She finished her question, though: “Is that Lithuanian?”

“Nyet. It’s Russian.”

“What’s it mean?”

The woman looked at her. “It’s not a nice thing to say.”

“I’m sorry, but—” What the hell, why not just tell the truth? “Somebody called me that once. I’ve always wondered what it meant.”

“I don’t know the English,” said the student. “It has to do with the female sex part, you know?” She looked bitterly at the receding figure of the man she’d been arguing with. “Not that he’s ever going to see mine again.”

Molly looked back at the receding figure. “The jerk,” she said.

“ Da,” said the student. She nodded curtly at Molly and continued on into the building.

Pierre accompanied Molly as she carried Amanda upstairs and put her in the crib at the foot of the king-size bed. They each leaned over in turn and kissed their daughter on the top of the head. Molly had been strangely subdued all evening — something was clearly on her mind.

Amanda looked at her father expectantly. Pierre smiled; he knew he wasn’t going to get off that easily. He picked up a copy of Put Me in the Zoo from the top of the dresser. Amanda shook her head. Pierre raised his eyebrows, but put the book back down. It had been her favorite five nights in a row. He’d yet to figure out what prompted his daughter to want a change, but since he now knew every word of that book by heart, he was quite ready to comply. He picked up a small square book called Little Miss Contrary , but Amanda shook her head again. Pierre tried a third time, picking up a Sesame Street book called Grover’s Big Day . Amanda smiled broadly. Pierre came over, sat on the foot of the bed, and began to read.

Molly, meanwhile, went back downstairs. Pierre got all the way through the book — about ten minutes’ worth of reading — before Amanda looked ready to fall asleep. He bent over again, kissed his daughter’s head once more, checked to make sure the baby monitor was still on, and slipped quietly out of the bedroom.

When he got down to the living room, Molly was sitting on the couch, one leg tucked up underneath her. She was holding a copy of the New Yorker , but didn’t seem to really be looking at it. A Shania Twain CD was playing softly in the background. Molly put down the magazine and looked at him. “Is Amanda asleep?” she said.

Pierre nodded. “I think so.”

Her tone was serious. “Good. I’ve been waiting for her to go down. We have to talk.”

Pierre came over to the couch and sat next to her. She looked at him briefly, then looked away. “Have I done something wrong?”

She faced him again. “No — no, not you.”

“Then what?”

Molly exhaled noisily. “I was worried about Amanda, so I did some research today.”

Pierre smiled encouragingly. “And?”

She looked away again. “It’s probably crazy, but…” She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “Some anthropologists contend that Neanderthal man had exactly the same throat structure as Dr. Gainsley said Amanda has.”

Pierre felt his eyebrows going up. “So?”

“So your boss, the famous Burian Klimus, has succeeded in extracting DNA from that Israeli Neanderthal specimen.”

“Hapless Hannah,” said Pierre. “But surely you don’t think—”

Molly looked at Pierre. “I love Amanda just as she is, but…”

“ Tabernac ,” said Pierre. “ Tabernac .”

He could see it all in his mind. After Molly, Pierre, Dr. Bacon, and Bacon’s assistants had left the operating theater, Klimus hadn’t proceeded to masturbate into a cup. Instead, he’d maneuvered the first of Molly’s eggs onto the end of a glass pipette, holding it there by suction. Working carefully under a microscope, he’d then slit the egg open and, using a smaller pipette, had drawn out Molly’s own haploid set of twenty-three chromosomes, and replaced them with a diploid set of Hannah’s forty-six chromosomes. The end result: a fertilized egg containing solely Hannah’s DNA.

Of course, opening up the egg would have damaged the zona pellucida, a jellylike coating on its surface necessary for embryo implantation and development. But ever since Jerry Hall and Sandra Yee had shown in 1991 that a synthetic zona pellucida could be coated onto egg cells, human cloning had been theoretically possible. And just two years later, at an American Fertility Society meeting in Montreal, of all places, Hall and his colleagues announced they had actually done it, although the embryos they’d cloned weren’t taken beyond the earliest stage. Yes, the technology did exist. What Molly was suggesting was a real possibility. Klimus could have used the procedure to make several eggs containing copies of Hannah’s DNA, cultured them in vitro to the multicellular state, and then Dr. Bacon — presumably unaware of their pedigree — would have inserted the embryos into Molly, hoping that at least one of them would implant.

“If it’s true,” said Molly, looking up at Pierre, gaze flicking back and forth between his left eye and his right, “if it’s true, it wouldn’t change the way you feel about Amanda, would it?”

Pierre was quiet for a moment.

Molly’s voice took on an urgent tone. “Would it?”

“Well, no. No, I suppose not. It’s just that, well, I mean, I knew she wasn’t my child — biologically, that is. I knew she wasn’t part of me. But I’d always thought she was part of you. But if what you’re suggesting is true, then…” He let the words trail off.