Bloodchild and Other Stories Read online

  “What is it?” Alan demanded later when we had left Naomi safely, totally focused on her new work—clay sculptures of us. “Does she only listen to women or something?”

  Beatrice took us back to the sitting room, sat us both down, but did not sit down herself. She went to a window and stared out. “Naomi only obeys certain women,” she said. “And she’s sometimes slow to obey. She’s worse than most—probably because of the damage she managed to do to herself before I got her.” Beatrice faced us, stood biting her lip and frowning. “I haven’t had to give this particular speech for a while,” she said. “Most DGDs have the sense not to marry each other and produce children. I hope you two aren’t planning to have any—in spite of our need.” She took a deep breath. “It’s a pheromone. A scent. And it’s sex-linked. Men who inherit the disease from their fathers have no trace of the scent. They also tend to have an easier time with the disease. But they’re useless to use as staff here. Men who inherit from their mothers have as much of the scent as men get. They can be useful here because the DGDs can at least be made to notice them. The same for women who inherit from their mothers but not their fathers. It’s only when two irresponsible DGDs get together and produce girl children like me or Lynn that you get someone who can really do some good in a place like this.” She looked at me. “We are very rare commodities, you and I. When you finish school you’ll have a very well-paying job waiting for you.”

  “Here?” I asked.

  “For training, perhaps. Beyond that, I don’t know. You’ll probably help start a retreat in some other part of the country. Others are badly needed.” She smiled humorlessly. “People like us don’t get along well together. You must realize that I don’t like you any more than you like me.”

  I swallowed, saw her through a kind of haze for a moment. Hated her mindlessly—just for a moment.

  “Sit back,” she said. “Relax your body. It helps.”

  I obeyed, not really wanting to obey her but unable to think of anything else to do. Unable to think at all. “We seem,” she said, “to be very territorial. Dilg is a haven for me when I’m the only one of my kind here. When I’m not, it’s a prison.”

  “All it looks like to me is an unbelievable amount of work,” Alan said.

  She nodded. “Almost too much.” She smiled to herself. “I was one of the first double DGDs to be born. When I was old enough to understand, I thought I didn’t have much time. First I tried to kill myself. Failing that, I tried to cram all the living I could into the small amount of time I assumed I had. When I got into this project, I worked as hard as I could to get it into shape before I started to drift. By now I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t working.”

  “Why haven’t you … drifted?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. There aren’t enough of our kind to know what’s normal for us.”

  “Drifting is normal for every DGD sooner or later.”

  “Later, then.”

  “Why hasn’t the scent been synthesized?” Alan asked. “Why are there still concentration-camp rest homes and hospital wards?”

  “There have been people trying to synthesize it since I proved what I could do with it. No one has succeeded so far. All we’ve been able to do is keep our eyes open for people like Lynn.” She looked at me. “Dilg scholarship, right?”

  “Yeah. Offered out of the blue.”

  “My people do a good job keeping track. You would have been contacted just before you graduated or if you dropped out.”

  “Is it possible,” Alan said, staring at me, “that she’s already doing it? Already using the scent to … influence people?”

  “You?” Beatrice asked.

  “All of us. A group of DGDs. We all live together. We’re all controlled, of course, but …” Beatrice smiled. “It’s probably the quietest house full of kids that anyone’s ever seen.”

  I looked at Alan, and he looked away. “I’m not doing anything to them,” I said. “I remind them of work they’ve already promised to do. That’s all.”

  “You put them at ease,” Beatrice said. “You’re there. You … well, you leave your scent around the house. You speak to them individually. Without knowing why, they no doubt find that very comforting. Don’t you, Alan?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose I must have. From my first visit to the house, I knew I wanted to move in. And when I first saw Lynn, I …” He shook his head. “Funny, I thought all that was my idea.”

  “Will you work with us, Alan?”

  “Me? You want Lynn.”

  “I want you both. You have no idea how many people take one look at one workroom here and turn and run. You may be the kind of young people who ought to eventually take charge of a place like Dilg.”

  “Whether we want to or not, eh?” he said.

  Frightened, I tried to take his hand, but he moved it away. “Alan, this works,” I said. “It’s only a stopgap, I know. Genetic engineering will probably give us the final answers, but for God’s sake, this is something we can do now!”

  “It’s something you can do. Play queen bee in a retreat full of workers. I’ve never had any ambition to be a drone.”

  “A physician isn’t likely to be a drone,” Beatrice said.

  “Would you marry one of your patients?” he demanded. “That’s what Lynn would be doing if she married me—whether I become a doctor or not.”

  She looked away from him, stared across the room. “My husband is here,” she said softly. “He’s been a patient here for almost a decade. What better place for him … when his time came?”

  “Shit!” Alan muttered. He glanced at me. “Let’s get out of here!” He got up and strode across the room to the door, pulled at it, then realized it was locked. He turned to face Beatrice, his body language demanding she let him out. She went to him, took him by the shoulder, and turned him to face the door. “Try it once more,” she said quietly. “You can’t break it. Try.”

  Surprisingly, some of the hostility seemed to go out of him. “This is one of those p.v. locks?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  I set my teeth and looked away. Let her work. She knew how to use this thing she and I both had. And for the moment, she was on my side.

  I heard him make some effort with the door. The door didn’t even rattle. Beatrice took his hand from it, and with her own hand flat against what appeared to be a large brass knob, she pushed the door open.

  “The man who created that lock is nobody in particular,” she said. “He doesn’t have an unusually high I.Q., didn’t even finish college. But sometime in his life he read a science-fiction story in which palmprint locks were a given. He went that story one better by creating one that responded to voice or palm. It took him years, but we were able to give him those years. The people of Dilg are problem solvers, Alan. Think of the problems you could solve!”

  He looked as though he were beginning to think, beginning to understand. “I don’t see how biological research can be done that way,” he said. “Not with everyone acting on his own, not even aware of other researchers and their work.”

  “It is being done,” she said, “and not in isolation. Our retreat in Colorado specializes in it and has—just barely—enough trained, controlled DGDs to see that no one really works in isolation. Our patients can still read and write—those who haven’t damaged themselves too badly. They can take each other’s work into account if reports are made available to them. And they can read material that comes in from the outside. They’re working, Alan. The disease hasn’t stopped them, won’t stop them.” He stared at her, seemed to be caught by her intensity—or her scent. He spoke as though his words were a strain, as though they hurt his threat. “I won’t be a puppet. I won’t be controlled … by a goddamn smell!”

  “Alan—”

  “I won’t be what my mother is. I’d rather be dead!”

  “There’s no reason for you to become what your mother is.”

  He drew back in obvious
disbelief.

  “Your mother is brain damaged—thanks to the three months she spent in that custodial-care toilet. She had no speech at all when I met her. She’s improved more than you can imagine. None of that has to happen to you. Work with us, and we’ll see that none of it happens to you.”

  He hesitated, seemed less sure of himself. Even that much flexibility in him was surprising. “I’ll be under your control or Lynn’s,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Not even your mother is under my control. She’s aware of me. She’s able to take direction from me. She trusts me the way any blind person would trust her guide.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Not here. Not at any of our retreats.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then you don’t understand how much individuality our people retain. They know they need help, but they have minds of their own. If you want to see the abuse of power you’re worried about, go to a DGD ward.”

  “You’re better than that, I admit. Hell is probably better than that. But …”

  “But you don’t trust us.”

  He shrugged.

  “You do, you know.” She smiled. “You don’t want to, but you do. That’s what worries you, and it leaves you with work to do. Look into what I’ve said. See for yourself. We offer DGDs a chance to live and do whatever they decide is important to them. What do you have, what can you realistically hope for that’s better than that?”

  Silence. “I don’t know what to think,” he said finally.

  “Go home,” she said. “Decide what to think. It’s the most important decision you’ll ever make.”

  He looked at me. I went to him, not sure how he’d react, not sure he’d want me no matter what he decided.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  The question startled me. “You have a choice,” I said. “I don’t. If she’s right … how could I not wind up running a retreat?”

  “Do you want to?”

  I swallowed. I hadn’t really faced that question yet. Did I want to spend my life in something that was basically a refined DGD ward? “No!”

  “But you will.”

  “… Yes.” I thought for a moment, hunted for the right words. “You’d do it.”

  “What?”

  “If the pheromone were something only men had, you would do it.”

  That silence again. After a time he took my hand, and we followed Beatrice out to the car. Before I could get in with him and our guard-escort, she caught my arm. I jerked away reflexively. By the time I caught myself, I had swung around as though I meant to hit her. Hell, I did mean to hit her, but I stopped myself in time. “Sorry,” I said with no attempt at sincerity.

  She held out a card until I took it. “My private number,” she said. “Before seven or after nine, usually. You and I will communicate best by phone.”

  I resisted the impulse to throw the card away. God, she brought out the child in me.

  Inside the car, Alan said something to the guard. I couldn’t hear what it was, but the sound of his voice reminded me of him arguing with her—her logic and her scent. She had all but won him for me, and I couldn’t manage even token gratitude. I spoke to her, low voiced.

  “He never really had a chance, did he?”

  She looked surprised. “That’s up to you. You can keep him or drive him away. I assure you, you can drive him away.”

  “How?”

  “By imagining that he doesn’t have a chance.” She smiled faintly. “Phone me from your territory. We have a great deal to say to each other, and I’d rather we didn’t say it as enemies.”

  She had lived with meeting people like me for decades. She had good control. I, on the other hand, was at the end of my control. All I could do was scramble into the car and floor my own phantom accelerator as the guard drove us to the gate. I couldn’t look back at her. Until we were well away from the house, until we’d left the guard at the gate and gone off the property, I couldn’t make myself look back. For long, irrational minutes, I was convinced that somehow if I turned, I would see myself standing there, gray and old, growing small in the distance, vanishing.

  Afterword

  “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” grew from my ongoing fascinations with biology, medicine, and personal responsibility.

  In particular, I began the story wondering how much of what we do is encouraged, discouraged, or otherwise guided by what we are genetically. This is one of my favorite questions, parent to several of my novels. It can be a dangerous question. All too often, when people ask it, they mean who has the biggest or the best or the most of whatever they see as desirable, or who has the smallest and the least of what is undesirable. Genetics as a board game, or worse, as an excuse for the social Darwinism that swings into popularity every few years. Nasty habit.

  And yet the question itself is fascinating. And disease, grim as it is, is one way to explore answers. Genetic disorders in particular may teach us much about who and what we are.

  I built Duryea-Gode disease from elements of three genetic disorders. The first is Huntington’s disease—hereditary, dominant, and thus an inevitability if one has the gene for it. And it is caused by only one abnormal gene. Also Huntington’s does not usually show itself until its sufferers are middle-aged.

  In addition to Huntington’s, I used phenylketonuria (PKU), a recessive genetic disorder that causes severe mental impairment unless the infant who has it is put on a special diet.

  Finally, I used Lesch-Nyhan disease, which causes both mental impairment and self-mutilation.

  To elements of these disorders, I added my own particular twists: a sensitivity to pheromones and the sufferers’ persistent delusion that they are trapped, imprisoned within their own flesh, and that that flesh is somehow not truly part of them. In that last, I took an idea familiar to us all—present in many religions and philosophies—and carried it to a terrible extreme.

  We carry as many as 50,000 different genes in each of the nuclei of our billions of cells. If one gene among the 50,000, the Huntington’s gene, for instance, can so greatly change our lives—what we can do, what we can become—then what are we?

  What, indeed?

  For readers who find this question as fascinating as I do, I offer a brief, unconventional reading list: The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior by Jane Goodall, The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing: The Experience and Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder by Judith L. Rapoport, Medical Detectives by Berton Roueché, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks.

  Enjoy!

  Near of Kin

  “She wanted you,” my uncle said. “She didn’t have to have a child, you know. Not even twenty-two years ago.”

  “I know.” I sat down opposite him in a comfortable wooden rocking chair in the living room of my mother’s apartment. At my feet were papers stuffed into a large cardboard lettuce box—papers loose and dog-eared, flat and enveloped, important and trivial, all jumbled together. Here was her marriage certificate, the deed to property she’d owned in Oregon, a handmade card done in green and red crayon on cheap age-darkened paper— “To Mama,” it said. “Merry Christmas.” I had made it when I was six and given it to my grandmother whom I called mama then. Now I wondered whether my grandmother had passed it on to my mother along with a kindly lie.

  “She was widowed just before you were born,” my uncle said. “She just couldn’t face caring for a child all alone.”

  “People do it all the time,” I said.

  “She wasn’t ‘people,’ she was herself. She knew what she could handle and what she couldn’t. She saw to it that you had a good home with your grandmother.”

  I looked at him, wondering why he still bothered to defend her. What difference did it make now what I felt for her—or didn’t feel. “I remember when I was about eight,” I said. “She came to see me, and I
asked if I could stay with her for awhile. She said I couldn’t, said she had to work, didn’t have room, didn’t have enough money, and a lot of other things. The message I got was that she didn’t want to be bothered with me. So I asked her if she was really my mother or if maybe I was adopted.”

  My uncle winced. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing. She hit me.”

  He sighed. “That temper of hers. She was too nervous, too high-strung. That was one of the reasons she left you with your grandmother.”

  “What were the others?”

  “I think you just listed them. Lack of money, space, time …”

  “Patience, love …”

  My uncle shrugged. “Is that what you wanted to talk to me about? All your reasons for disliking your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  I stared at the box on the floor. The bottom of it had broken with the weight of the papers when I took it from my mother’s closet. Maybe there was masking tape somewhere in the apartment. I got up to look, thinking my uncle might get tired of my silence and leave. He did that sometimes—his own quiet form of impatience. It used to scare me when I was little. Now, I would have almost welcomed it. If he left, I wouldn’t have to tell him what I wanted to talk to him about … yet. He had always been a friend as well as a relative—my mother’s five-years-older brother, and the only relative other than my grandmother who’d ever paid more than passing attention to me. He used to talk to me sometimes at my grandmother’s house. He treated me like a little adult, because in spite of all the children his married brothers and sisters had, no one had ever convinced him that children were not little adults. He put a lot of pressure on me without realizing he was doing it, but still, I preferred him to the other aunts and uncles, to the old ladies who were my grandmother’s friends, to anyone who had ever patted me on the head and told me to be a good little girl. I got along better with him than I had with my mother, so even now, especially now, I didn’t want to lose him.