Robert Sawyer - Frameshift

Pierre looked around the lab helplessly. “There must be something I can do. Wash beakers, sort files — something.”

Shari looked over at the garbage pail, where the broken glass from a flask Pierre had dropped earlier in the day was resting. “You’ve given so much time to the project,” she said. “But — well, I know you’re the one who is supposed to quote the Nobel laureates, but didn’t Woodrow Wilson say, ‘I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.’ You can borrow mine; I’ll carry on for both of us. It’s time for you to relax. Spend some time with your wife and daughter.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. He’d known this day would come, but this was too soon — much too soon.

There was an awkward moment between them, and Pierre was reminded of that afternoon three and a half years earlier when he’d ended up holding Shari as she cried over the breakup of her engagement. She perhaps recognized the similarity, too, for, with a small smile, she moved closer and lightly wrapped her arms around him, not squeezing tightly, not constricting his body’s rhythmic dance.

“You will be remembered, Pierre,” she said. “You know that. You’ll be remembered forever for what you discovered here.”

Pierre nodded, trying to take comfort in the words, but soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” said Shari softly. “Don’t cry.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “I know we did good work here,” he said, “but…”

She brushed his hair off his forehead. “But what?”

“Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can understand bits and pieces of it. But the big picture — the nucleotides, the enzymes, the reactions, the gene sequences…” He reached up with a trembling hand and wiped his cheek.

“I don’t remember it all, and what I do remember, I don’t understand anymore.”

Shari stroked his shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You did the work. You made the discoveries. I can finish it up from here.”

Pierre looked up at her. “But what am I going to do now? I — I don’t know how to do anything except be a geneticist.”

Shari spoke softly. “There was another phone message for you from Barnaby Lincoln at the Chronicle . Why not give him a call?”

Eighteen Months Later Pierre was busy these days. Barnaby Lincoln was right — lobbying was satisfying work. And who knew? Someday it might even bear fruit.

Meanwhile, Shari had finished up their jointly authored paper — “An intronic DNA mechanism for invoking frameshift mutations as a driving force in evolution” — and submitted it to Nature .

But today was a day off from worrying about what the journal’s referees were going to make of the paper, a day off from working the phones and dictating letters.

They couldn’t just go to the portrait studio at Sears; taking pictures of the Tardivel-Bond family was a little more complicated than that. Pierre had good moments and bad, and they had to wait more than an hour for him to have enough control to sit reasonably still. And Amanda — well, at three years of age, she was doing better dealing with other people, but it was still easier to keep her away from well-meaning but stupid adults who constantly said the wrong things, thinking that because she didn’t talk she also couldn’t hear.

Molly had helped Pierre put on his clothes, as she did every day now. At first she’d thought about having him dress up in a suit and tie, all formal and staid, but that wasn’t Pierre, and she wanted to remember him the way he really was. Instead, she helped him put on the red Montreal

Canadiens hockey jersey he was so fond of.

For her part, Molly did dress a little more fancily than she normally would, wearing a powder blue silk top and a stylish black skirt. She even put on some lipstick and eye shadow.

They’d borrowed the elaborate camera and tripod from the university.

Two chairs were set up in front of the fireplace, and Molly carefully framed the shot.

Amanda was in a lovely pink dress with small flowers on it. Molly had toyed with fighting the stereotype, but for today, at least, she wanted her daughter to look just like any other little girl. Sometimes such things did matter.

Finally, Pierre said, “I think… I’m ready.”

Molly smiled and helped him into one of the chairs. His right forearm was moving a little bit, but once he was settled in, Pierre moved his left hand over it, holding it steady. Molly sat down, smoothed out her clothes, and signed for Amanda to come and sit in her lap. She did so, enjoying flouncing across the room in her skirt.

Molly kissed her forehead, and Amanda grinned. In her left hand Molly held the remote control for the camera. She pointed a finger at the lens and told Amanda to look into it and smile.

Pierre lifted his left hand from his right arm and he, too, smiled when he saw that it was, at least for the moment, no longer flailing. He managed to slowly raise it up and drape it around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda reached up with her small hand and grasped three of her father’s fingers. Molly squeezed the remote, and first the preflash and then the real flash went off.

Amanda bounced in her mother’s lap, startled but excited by the bright lights. Molly waited for her to settle down a bit before trying another exposure and, while she did so, she reflected on what a truly remarkable family portrait they were making. It wasn’t just a woman and her husband and their child, a mother, father, and daughter all very much in love. It was also, in a very real sense, a portrait of the human race — of silence, of speech, and of telepathy, of past, present, and future, of where it had come from, where it is, and where it is going.

Molly’s telepathy, here, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, had been an accident — the result of a single nucleotide having squeezed its way into her DNA. But the genetic code to produce the telepathy neurotransmitter was there, hidden, frameshifted into something else, in the DNA of every man and woman on earth.

Molly’s words came back to her: “Maybe someday far in the future, humanity might be able to handle something like this. But not now; it’s not the right time.”

Not the right time.

Pierre’s discoveries had been astounding: it was all in there. Not just what we had been. Not just codes to make tails and scales and hard-shelled eggs. Not just our fishy and amphibious and reptilian past.

Not just the commands that played out the dance of ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny during an embryo’s development. Not just leftovers and discards.

Not just junk .

Yes, the past was in there. But so was the future. So was the blueprint, the master plan, what we would become.

What was it she had said to Pierre, all those years ago? “God planned out all the broad strokes in advance — the general direction life would take, the general path for the universe — but, after setting everything in motion, he’s content to simply watch it all unfold, to let it grow and develop on its own, following the course he laid down.”

She squeezed the camera’s remote again. Illumination was everywhere.

Amanda looked up at her father and moved her hands. Why are we d oing this ?

“We’re doing this,” said Pierre, “because we’re a family.” The words came out slowly but clearly.

Amanda’s large brown eyes looked up at him. Her face contorted. She’d been trying for ages, practicing in secret with her mother. They’d even been interrupted one morning when Pierre had come up to the living room without them being aware of his arrival, but she’d never yet managed it. Still, she knew that this was indeed a very special moment, and so she tried again with all her might.