Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

One such friend is Jeff Lin of Harvey Danger. He came into my home years ago as my daughter’s friend. In the course of sharing coffee, cats, and conversation, his thoughts on creativity in the music field, performing for an audience, and Who Owns the Work left a definite impression on me. I wrote “Drum Machine” as a direct result of one such conversation and indeed a single sentence from Jeff. It’s languished in my files for a long time. In the course of looking over stories for this collection, I took it out, read it, and wondered if its time had finally come to see print.

The client leaned forward across the desk and all but hissed at me, “I have a right to the child of my choice.”

I smiled at her warmly, reassuringly, and read my line from the prompter. “That’s not precisely correct, Mrs. Daw. You have the right to a child. That’s very clear.” I tapped the notarized slip from her husband, ceding his population replacement right to her. “And you have the right to a choice. The Constitution guarantees you that.”

She thrust her already prominent chin at me. “Then I want my choice. Another EagleScout12.” She smiled exultantly. “Derek is almost six now, and he has been the perfect choice for my husband and me. When we decided we wanted another child, we decided, well, why take a chance? Get one we know we’ll like.”

I leaned back in my chair and blinked my eyes twice quickly to call up the next screen. I chose the conciliatory option. “I’m sure, on the face of it, that seemed logical to both of you. But consider the reality, Mrs. Daw. You would essentially be raising identical twins, born six years apart, into the same environment. Same nature, same nurture. Where’s the variety in that? You’d be defeating our entire Genetic Variety Preservation program. Even if you can’t choose an EagleScout12 again, that doesn’t mean your next child won’t be just as perfect for you as your first one was. That’s the whole purpose of our counseling, Mrs. Daw. The embryo options that the program has chosen are selected to be compatible with you and Mr. Daw. And, I might add, with Derek.”

Her eyes widened somewhat. “Could that be why we’re not offered another EagleScout12? Because he might not be compatible with Derek?”

I smiled and shrugged. “I suppose that could be so.” Actually, that particular embryo had been discontinued, but that was not something the client needed to know. They always asked why. Not even I had access to that information. “I’m just a Social Interface, ma’am, not a biologist. But I wonder if you haven’t hit on the very reason.” I eyed the timer in the bottom left quarter of my goggle-screen, but my smile never faltered.

She had taken up almost seventeen minutes of my time, over twice the normal allotment, trying to nag an approval out of me. When she had first sat down in my cubicle, I had popped her disk into my machine and tapped in the latest information. She hadn’t liked the choices we’d offered, but her request for another EagleScout12 had come up with a solid Denied. But you don’t flatly tell the applicant that. If that was all there was to my job, I wouldn’t have a job. The computer could do it. As a Social Interface, class 7, it’s up to me to select the right words and tones and mannerisms from the suggested dialogue on my screen. Mrs. Daw was a tough one, but in the next three minutes, I managed to send her on her way. She had even looked happy with her new selection, a female DutchDoll7. She strode away, clutching the appointment slip that would let her fetus be implanted tomorrow.

I was forty-five minutes from the end of my shift. Three, maybe four more people to counsel and I was through for the day. I was ready to go home. I rocked back in my chair in my cubicle and heard my spine crackle. Then I straightened up and pushed the “next client” button.

I work for the state in Reproductive Permits. My position is Social Interface. I’ve been there about seven years now, and I like to think that I’m good at what I do. It wasn’t a job I would have chosen for myself, but the state aptitude test rated me high for Social Interface duties. The woman in the Aptitude offices who told me about the job opportunities in the field was a Social Interface herself. There was something about her voice when she told me that she just knew I’d be right for the job. I couldn’t help but believe her. And over the years, I’ve come to be like her. People come to me, and they listen to me, and they go away believing me. I make them contented with their choice. There’s satisfaction in that. It’s proof that I’m good at what I do. Everyone deserves to believe that he’s good at what he does. I got little of that in my previous job.

Out in the waiting room, I saw my next applicant stand up. She clutched a slip of paper in her hand as she looked down the row of Social Interface cubicles. In her other hand, she carried a canvas shopping bag. She came straight for me. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking up at the number flashing green over my cubicle. But I saw her face, and despite her sunglasses and all the harsh years since I’d last seen her, I recognized her.

I should have red-lighted right then. There’s no regulation that says we can’t counsel people we know, but we all know it’s frowned on. It’s not like a Social Interface can change the computer’s decision, but maybe that’s why it’s best for an applicant to hear it from a stranger. It’s less personal that way. Many people don’t want their friends to know they’ve been turned down for their first or second or even third choice. Everyone would like the neighbors to think that the child you gave birth to was your dream kid from the start.

I didn’t red-light. Instead, I sat there, watching Cecily rush toward me like shrapnel from the past. The Blonde Banshee, Cliff had called her. That was when he wasn’t calling her Cecily the Willing. How two people could love and hate each other so much, I still don’t know. Being around them was like escorting a bomb. They could explode in any setting, in restaurants, on trains, even onstage. Public mayhem never bothered either of them. I’d seen Cecily overturn a table on the whole band for the sake of dumping an expensive dinner in Cliff’s lap. But I’d also seen her beatific smile the time I nearly broke my neck falling over their coupled bodies in a hotel stairwell at two in the morning in Vancouver.

“No limits, Chesterton,” Cliff had told me later. “No limits to what we can make each other feel. It’s the magic. What good is a woman who can only make you love her? That’s only half the passion, man. Only half.”

He made it sound so logical that while he was talking, I believed it. Cliff was like that. He would have made a good Social Interface himself, if he’d lived long enough to hold down a real job. He killed himself when he was twenty-seven. He knew what people would say about that. He even left it as his death note. “All the real ones check out at twenty-seven,” he wrote. And that was it.

By the time he reached that point, I didn’t really know him anymore. The band had fallen apart three or four years before then. His death was something I read about in the newspaper, a scrap of news in a column full of celebrity notes. Cliff Wangle, former drummer for the Coolie Fish, Oberon’s Jest, Hazardous Waste, and most recently with the Flat Plats, died of an overdose at twenty-seven. That was it. I read about it over my breakfast cereal and thought, Well, that’s it, it’s really over now . We had shared a year and a half of almost being famous. The Flat Plats had had one commercial CD release, with one Top Ten song and one in the high teens. We had barely tasted our success before the cup was dashed away from us. Cliff was the one who had done the smashing.