7.
We go to class. Caroline cannot dance. She tries and then stops. She sits in a corner. Mr. Privitera sits in another corner. Caroline watches Deborah. The dancers raise one hind leg. They spin and jump.
Madame holds up her hand. The music stops. "Deborah, let us see that again, s'il vous plais. Alone."
The other dancers move away. They look at each other. They smell surprised. The music starts again and Deborah raises one hind leg very high. She spins and jumps.
Mr. Privitera says, "Let me see the bolero from Coppelia. Madame says you know it."
"Y-yes," Deborah says. She dances alone.
"Very nice, dear," Mr. Privitera says. "You are much improved."
The other dancers look at each other again.
Everybody dances.
Caroline watches Deborah hard.
#
Deborah's face looked like every Christmas morning in the entire world. She grabbed both my hands. "They invited me to join the company!"
My suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by discarded clothes I wasn't taking to the bioenhancement conference in Paris. My daughter picked up a pile of spidersilk blouses and hurled them into the air. In the soft April air from the open window the filmy, artificial material drifted and danced. "I can't believe it! They asked me to join the company! I'm in!"
She whirled around the tiny room, rising on toe in her street shoes, laughing and exclaiming. My silence went unnoticed. Deborah did an arabesque to the bedpost, then plopped herself down on my best dress. "Don't you want to know what happened, Mom?"
"What happened, Deborah?"
"Well, Mr. Privitera came to watch class, and Madame asked me to repeat the variation alone. God, I thought I'd die. Then Mr. Privitera -- not Madame -- asked me to do the bolero from Coppelia. For an awful minute I couldn't remember a single step. Then I did, and he said it was very nice! He said I was much improved!"
Accolades from the king. But even in my numbness I could see there was something she wasn't telling me.
"I thought you told me the company doesn't choose any new dancers this close to the end of the season?"
She sobered immediately. "Not usually. But Caroline Olson was fired. She missed rehearsals and performances, and she wasn't even taking the trouble to prepare her roles. Her reviews have been awful."
"I saw them," I said.
Deborah looked at me sharply. "Ego, I guess. Caroline's always been sort of a bitch. So apparently they're not letting her go to Saratoga, because Tina Patrochov and a guest artist are dividing her roles, and Mr. Privitera told Jill Kerrigan to learn Tina's solo from Sleeping Beauty. So that left a place in the corps de ballet, and they chose me!"
I had had enough time to bring myself to say it.
"Congratulations, sweetheart."
"When does your plane for Paris leave?"
This non-sequitur -- if it was that -- turned me back to my packing. "Seven tonight."
"And you'll be gone ten days. You'll have a great time in Paris. Maybe the next time the company goes on tour, I'll go with them!"
She whirled out of the room.
I sat at the end of the bed, holding onto the bedpost. When Deborah was three, she'd wanted a ride on a camel. Somehow it had become an obsession. She talked about camels in daycare, at dinnertime, at bedtime. She drew pictures of camels, misshapen things with one huge hump. Camels were in short supply in St. Louis. Ignore it, everyone said, kids forget these things, she'll get over it. Deborah never forgot. She didn't get over it. Pers had just left us, and I was consumed with the anxiety of a single parent. Finally I paid a friend to tie a large wad of hay under a blanket on his very old, very swaybacked horse. A Peruvian camel, I told my three-year-old. A very special kind. You can have a ride.
"That's not a camel," Deborah had said, with nostril-lifted disdain. "That's a heffalunt!"
I read last week in World that the animal-biotech scientists have built a camel with the flexible trunk of an elephant. The trunk can lift up to forty-five pounds. It was expected to be a useful beast of burden in the Sahara.
I finished packing for Paris.
#
Paris in April was an unending gray drizzle. The book and software stalls along the Seine kept up their electronic weather shields, giving them the hazy, streaming-gutter look of abandoned outhouses. The gargoyles on Notre Dame looked insubstantial in the rain, irrelevant in the face of camels with trunks. The French, as usual, conspired to make Americans -- especially Americans who speak only rudimentary French -- feel crass and barbaric. My clothes were wrong. My desire for a large breakfast was wrong. The Fifth International Conference on Human Bioenhancement had lost my press credentials.
The conference was held in one of the huge new hotels in Neuilly, near the Eurodisney Gene Zoo. I couldn't decide if this was an attempt to provide entertainment or irony. Three hundred scientists and doctors, a hundred press, and at least that many industrial representatives, plus groupies, thronged the hotel. The scientists presented papers; the industrial reps, mostly from biotech or pharmaceutical firms, presented "infoforums." The moment I walked in, carrying provisional credentials, I felt the tension, a peculiar kind of tension instantly recognizable to reporters. Something big was going on. Big and unpleasant.
From the press talk in the bar I learned that the presentation to not miss was Thursday night by Dr. Gerard Taillebois of the Pasteur Research Institute, in conjunction with Dr. Greta Erbland of Steckel und Osterhoff. This pairing of a major research facility with a commercial biotech firm was common in Europe. Sometimes the addition of a hospital made it a triumvirate. A hand-written addendum on the program showed that the presentation had been moved from the Napoleon Room to the Grand Ballroom. I checked out the room; it was approximately the size of an airplane hangar. Hotel employees were setting up acres of chairs.
I asked a garcon to point out Dr. Taillebois to me. He was a tall, bald man in his sixties or seventies who looked like he hadn't slept or eaten in days.
Wednesday night I went to the Paris Opera Ballet. The wet pavement in front of the Opera House gleamed like black patent leather. Patrons dripped jewels and fur. This gala was why Michael had funded my trip; my first ballet article for New York Now had proved popular, despite its vapidity. Or maybe because of it. Tonight the famous French company was dancing an eclectic program, with guest artists from the Royal Ballet and the Kirov. Michael wanted 5,000 words on the oldest ballet company in the world.
I watched bioenhanced British dancers perform the wedding pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty, with its famous fishdives; Danish soloists in twentieth-century dances by Georges Balanchine; French ballerinas in contemporary works by their brilliant choreographer Louis Dufort. All of them were breathtaking. In the new ballets, especially choreographed for these bioenhanced bodies, the dancers executed sustained movements no natural body would have been capable of making at all, at a speed that never looked machine-like. Instead the dancers were flashes of light: lasers, optic signals, nerve impulses surging and across the stage and triggering pleasure centers in the brains of the delighted audience.
I gaped at one pas de trois in which the male dancer lifted two women at once, holding them aloft in swallow lifts over his head, one on each palm, then turning them slowly for a full ninety seconds. It wasn't a bench-pressing stunt. It was the culmination of a yearning, lyrical dance, as tender as any in the great nineteenth-century ballets. The female dancers were lowered slowly to the floor, and they both flowed through a fouette of adage as if they hadn't any bones.
Not one dancer had been replaced in the evening's program due to injury. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen a performance of the New York City Ballet without a last-minute substitution.
During intermission, profoundly depressed, I bought a glass of wine in the lobby. The eddying crowd receded for a moment, and I was face to face with Anna Olson, seated regally in her powerchair and flanked by her bodyguards. Holding tight to her hand was a little girl of five or six, dressed in a pink party dress and pink tights, with wide blue eyes, black hair, and a long slim neck. She might have been Caroline Olson fifteen years ago.
"Ms. Olson," I said.
She looked at me coldly, without recognition.
"I'm Susan Matthews. We met at the private reception for Anton Privitera at Georgette Allen's," I lied.
"Yes?" she said, but her eyes raked me. My dress wasn't the sort that turned up at the private fundraisers of New York billionaires. I didn't give her a chance to cut me.
"This must be your -- " granddaughter? Caroline, an only child, had never interrupted her dancing career for pregnancy. niece? grandniece? " -- your ward."
"Je m'appelle Marguerite," the child said eagerly. "Nous regardons le ballet."
"Do you study ballet, Marguerite?"
"Mais oui!" she said scornfully, but Anna Olson made a sign and the bodyguards deftly cut me off from both of them. By maneuvering around the edge of the hall, I caught a last, distant glimpse of Marguerite. She waited patiently in line to go back to her seat. Her small feet in pink ballet slippers turned out in a perfect fifth position.
Thursday afternoon I drove into Paris to rent an electronic translator for the presentation by Taillebois and Erbland. The translators furnished by the conference were long since claimed. People who had rented them for the opening talks simply hung onto them, afraid to miss anything. The Taillebois/Erbland presentation would include written hand outs in French, English, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, but not until the session was over. I was afraid to miss anything, either.
I couldn't find a electronic translator with a brand name I trusted. I settled for a human named Jean-Paul, from a highly recommended commercial agency. He was about four feet ten, with sad brown eyes and a face wrinkled into fantastic crevasses. He told me he had translated for charles de Gaulle during the crisis in Algeria. I believed him. He looked older than God.
We drove back to Neuilly in the rain. I said, "Jean-Paul, do you like ballet?"
"Non," he said immediately. "It is too slippery an art for me."
"Slippery?"
"Nothing is real. Girls are spirits of the dead, or joyous peasants, or other silly things. Have you ever seen any real peasants, Mademoiselle? They are not joyous. And girls lighter than air land on stage with a thump!" He illustrated by smacking the dashboard with his palm. "Men die of love for those women. Nobody dies for love. They die for money, or hate, but not love. Non."
"But isn't all art no more than illusion?"
He shrugged. "Not all illusion is worth creating. Not silly illusions. Dancers wobbling on tippy toes ... non, non."
I said carefully, "French dancers can be openly bioenhanced. Not like in the United States. To some of us, that gives the art a whole new excitement. Technical, if not artistic."
Jean-Paul shrugged again. "Anybody can be bioenhanced, if they have the money. Bioenhancement, by itself it does not impress me. My grandson is bioenhanced."
"What does he do?"
Jean-Paul twisted his body toward me in the seat of the car. "He is a soccer player! One of the best in the world! If you followed the sport, you would know his name. Claude Despreaux. Soccer -- now there is illusion worth creating!"
His tone was exactly Anton Privitera's, talking about ballet.
#
Thursday evening, just before the presentation, I finally caught Deborah at home. Her face on the phonevid was drawn and strained. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing, Mom. How's Paris?"
"Wet. Deborah, you're not telling me the truth."
"Everything's fine! I just ... just had a complicated rehearsal today."
The corps de ballet does not usually demand complicated rehearsals. The function of the corps is to move gracefully behind the soloists and principal dancers; it's seldom allowed to do anything that will distract from their virtuosity. I said carefully, "Are you injured?"
"No, of course not. Look, I have to go."
"Deborah ... "
"They're waiting for me!" The screen went blank.
Who was waiting for her? It was 1:00 a.m. in New York.
When I called back, there was no answer.
I went to the Grand Ballroom. Jean-Paul had been holding both our seats, lousy ones, since noon. An hour later, the presentation still had not started.
The audience fidgeted, tense and muttering. Finally a woman dressed in a severe suit entered. She spoke German. Jean-Paul translated into my ear.
"Good evening. I am Katya Waggenschauser. I have an announcement before we begin. I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. Dr. Taillebois ... He ... " Abruptly she ran off the stage.
The muttering rose to an astonished roar.
A man walked on stage. The crowd quieted immediately. Jean-Paul translated from the French, "I am Dr. Valois of the Pasteur Institute. Shortly Dr. Erbland will begin the presentation. But I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. There has been an unfortunate accident. Dr. Taillebois is dead."
The murmuring rose, fell again. I heard reporters whispering into camphones in six languages.
"In a few moments Dr. Erbland will make her and Dr. Taillebois's presentation. Please be patient just a few moments longer."
Eventually someone introduced Dr. Erbland, a long and fulsome introduction, and she walked onto the stage. A thin, tall woman in her sixties, she looked shaken and pale. She opened by speaking about how various kinds of bioenhancement differed from each other in intent, procedure, and biological mechanism. Most bioenhancements were introduced into an adult body that had already finished growing. A few, usually aimed at correcting hereditary problems, were carried out on infants. Those procedures were somewhat closer to the kinds of genetic re-engineering -- it was not referred to merely as "bioenhancement" -- that produced new strains of animals. And as with animals, science had long known that it was possible to manipulate pre-embryonic human genes in the same way, in vitro.
The audience grew completely quiet.
In vitro work, Dr. Erbland said, offered by its nature fewer guides and guarantees. There were much coded redundancies in genetic information, and that made it difficult to determine long-term happenings. The human genome map, the basis of all embryonic re-engineering, had been complete for forty years, but "complete" was not the same as "understood." The body had many genetic behaviors that researchers were only just beginning to understand. No one could have expected that when embryonic re-engineering first began, as a highly experimental undertaking, that genetic identity would be so stubborn.
Stubborn? I didn't know what she meant. Apparently, neither did anybody else in the audience. People scarcely breathed.
This experimental nature of embryonic manipulation in humans did not, of course, stop experimentation, Dr. Erbland continued. Before such experimentation was declared illegal by the Copenhagen Accord, many laboratories around the world had advanced science with the cooperation of voluntary subjects. Completely voluntary, she said. She said it three times.
I wondered how an embryo volunteered.
These voluntary subjects had been re-engineered using variants of the same techniques that produced in vitro bioenhancements in other mammals. Her company, in conjunction with the Pasteur Research Institute, had been pioneers in the new techniques. For over thirty years.
Thirty years. My search of the literature had found nothing going back that far. At least not those available on the standard scientific nets. If such "re-engineered" embryos had been allowed to fully gestate, and had survived, they were just barely within the cut-off date for legal existence. Were we talking about embryos or people here?
Dr. Erblans made a curious gesture: raising both arms from the elbow, then letting them fall. It looked almost like a plea. Was she making a public confession of breaking international law? Why would she do that?
Over such a long time, Dr. Erblans continued, the human genetic identity, encoded in "jumping genes" in many unsuspected redundant ways, reasserted itself. This was the subject of her and Dr. Taillebois's work. Unfortunately, the effect on the organism -- completely unanticipated by anyone -- could be biologically devastating. This first graphic showed basal DNA changes in a re-engineered embryo created twenty-five years ago. The subject, a male, was --
A holograph projected a complicated, three-dimensional genemap. The scientists in the audience leaned forward intently. The non-scientists looked at each other.
As the presentation progressed, anchored in graphs and formulas and genemap holos, it became clear even to me what Dr. Erbland was actually saying.
European geneticists had been experimenting on embryos as long as thirty years ago, and never stopped. They'd had allowed some of those embryos to become people. Against international law, and without knowing the long-term effects. And now the long-term effects, like old bills, were coming due, and those people's bodies were destroying themselves at the genetic level.
We had engineered a bioenhanced cancer to replace the natural one we had conquered.
It was a few moments before I noticed that Jean-Paul had stopped translating. He sat like stone, his wrinkled face lengthened in sorrow.
The audience forgot this was a scientific conference. "How many people have been re-engineered at an embryonic level?" someone shouted in English. "Total number worldwide!"
Someone else shouted, "Y todos van a morir?"
"Les lois internationales -- "
"Der sagt -- "
Dr. Erbland broke into a long, passionate speech, clearly not part of the prepared presentation. I caught the word "sagt" several times: law. I remembered that Dr. Erblans worked for a commercial biotech firm wholly owned by a pharmaceutical company.
The same company in which Anna Olson owned a fortune in stock.
Jean-Paul said quietly, "My grandson. Claude. He was one of those embryos. They told us it was safe ... "
I looked at the old man, slumped forward, and I couldn't find any sympathy for him. That appalled me. A cherished grandson ... But they had agreed, Claude's parents, to roulette with a child's life. In order to produce a superior soccer player. "Soccer -- now there is an illusion worth creating."
I remembered Anna Olson at the demonstration by the Lincoln Center fountain: "Caroline had a good run. For a dancer." Caroline Olson, Deborah said, had been fired because she missed rehearsals and performances. The Times had called her last performance "a travesty." Because her body was eating itself at a genetic level, undetectable by the City Ballet bioscans that assumed you could compare new DNA patterns to the body's original, which no procedure completely erased. But for Caroline, the original itself had carried the hidden blueprint for destruction. For twenty-six years.
The ultimate ballet mother had made Caroline into what Anna Olson needed her to be. For as long as Caroline might last.
And then I remembered little Marguerite, standing with her perfect turn out in fifth position.
I stood and pushed my way to the exit. I had to get out of that room. Nobody else left. Dr. Erbland, rattled and afraid, tried to answer questions shouted in six languages. I shoved past a woman who was punching her neighbor. Gendarmes appeared as if conjured from the floorboards. Maybe that would be next.
The hardcopies of Dr. Taillebois's original presentation were stacked neatly on tables in the lobby. I took one in English. As I went out the door, I heard a gendarme say clearly to somebody, "Oui, il s'a suicide, Dr. Taillebois."
I didn't want to stay an hour longer in Paris. I packed at the hotel and changed my ticket at Orly. On the plane home I made myself read the Taillebois/Erbland paper. Most of it was incomprehensible to me; what I understood was obscene. I kept seeing Marguerite in her pink ballet slippers, Caroline staggering on stage. If my lack of sympathy for Taillebois and Erbland was a lack in me, then so be it.
For the first time since Deborah had entered the School of American Ballet, and despite the dazzling performances at the Paris Opera, I found myself respecting Anton Privitera.
#
When I landed at Kennedy, at almost midnight, there was a message from the electronic gate keeper, "Call this number immediately. Urgent and crucial." I didn't recognize the number.
Deborah. An accident. I raced to the nearest public phone. But it wasn't a hospital; it was an attorney's office.
"Ms. Susan Matthews? Hold, please."
A man's face came on the screen. "This is James Beecher, Ms. Matthews. I'm attorney for Pers Anders. He's being held without bail, pending trial. He left a message for you, most urgent. The message is -- "
"Trial? On what charges?" But I think I already knew. The well-cut suit on the lawyer. The move to an expensive neighborhood. Pers was working for somebody, and there weren't very many things he knew how to do.
"The charges are dealing in narcotics. First-degree felony. The message is -- "
"Sunshine, right? No, that wouldn't have been expensive enough for Pers," I said bitterly. "Designer viruses? Pleasure center beanos?"
"The message is, 'Don't look in the caverns of the moon.' That's all." The screen went blank.
I stared at it anyway. When Deborah was tiny, in the brief period a million years ago when Pers and I were still together and raising her, she had a game she loved. She'd hide a favorite toy somewhere and call out, "Don't look in the closet! Don't look under the bed! Don't look in the sock drawer!" The toy was always wherever she said not to look. The caverns of the moon was what she called her bedroom, but that was much later, long after Pers had deserted us both but before she tracked him down in New York. I didn't know that he even knew about it.
Don't look in the caverns of the moon.
I took a helo right to the Central Park landing stage, charging it to the magazine. The last five blocks I ran, past the automated stores that never sleep and the night people who had just gotten up. Deborah wasn't home; she didn't expect me back from Paris until tomorrow. I tore apart her bedroom, and in an old dance bag I found it, flattened between the mattress and box spring. No practiced criminal, my Deborah.
The powder was pinkish, with no particular odor. There was a lot of it. I had no idea what it was; probably it had a unique name to go with a unique formula matched to some brain function. What kind of father would use his own daughter as a courier for this designer-gene abyss? Would the cops have already have been here if I'd come home a day later? An hour later?
I flushed it all down the toilet, including the dance bag, which I first cut into tiny pieces. Then I searched the rest of the apartment, and then I searched it again. There were no more drugs. There was no money.
She wasn't running stuff for Pers for free. Not Deborah. She had spent the money somewhere.
"They asked me to join the company! He said it was very nice! He said I was much improved!"
I made myself sit and think. It was one o'clock in the morning. Lincoln Center would be locked and dark. She might be at a restaurant with other dancers; she might be staying the night with a friend. I called other SAB students. Each answered sleepily. Deborah wasn't there. Ninette told me that after the evening performance Deborah had said she was going home.
"Well, yes, Ms. Matthews, she did seem a little tense," Ninette said, stifling a yawn, her long hair tousled on the shoulders of her nightgown. "But it was only her second night in actual performance, so I thought ... " The young voice trailed off. I wasn't going to be told whatever this girl thought. Clearly I was an interfering mother.
You bet I was.