Sisters

  himself.

  "Surely you know why by now," Jane said, looking down

  at the table, either nonplussed or getting angry. Now that she

  had laid out her course, Letitia couldn't help but forge ahead.

  "I don't. Not really. It's not because you're religious."

  "Something like that," Donald said.

  "No," Jane said, shaking her head firmly.

  "Then why?"

  "Your mother and I--"

  "I am not just their mother," Jane said.

  "Jane and I believe there is a certain plan in nature, a plan

  we shouldn't interfere with. If we had gone along with most of

  the others and tried to have PPCs--participated in the boy-girl

  lotteries and signed up for the prebirth opportunity counseling--why,

  we would have been interfering."

  "Did you go to a hospital when we were born?"

  "Yes," Jane said, still avoiding their faces.

  "That's not natural," Letitia said. "Why not let nature

  decide whether we'd be born alive or not?"

  "We have never claimed to be consistent," Donald said.

  "Donald," Jane said ominously.

  "There are limits," Donald expanded, smiling placation.

  "We believe those limits begin when people try to interfere

  with the sex cells. You've had all that in school. You know

  about the protests when the first PPCs were born. Your grandmother

  was one of the protesters. Your mother and I are both

  NGs; or course, our generation has a much higher percentage of

  NGs."

  "Now we're freaks," Letitia said.

  "If by that you mean them aren't many teenage NGs, I

  suppose that's right," Donald said, touching his wife's ann.

  "But it could also mean you're special. Chosen."

  "No," Letitia said. "Not chosen. You played dice with

  both of us. We could have been DDs. Duds. Not just dingies,

  but retards or spaz."

  An uncomfortable quiet settled over the table. "Not likely,''

  Donald said, his voice barely above a whisper. "Your

  mother and I both have good genotypes. Your grandmother

  insisted your mother marry a good genotype. There are no

  developmentally disabled people in our families."

  Letitia had been hemmed in. There was no way she could

  see out of it, so she pushed back her chair and excused herself

  from the table.

  As she made her way up to her room, she heard arguing

  below. Roald raced up the stairs behind her and gave her a dirty

  look. "Why'd you have to bring all that up?" he asked. "It's

  bad enough at school, we don't have to have it here."

  She thought about the history the AC had shown her. Back

  then, a family with their income wouldn't have been able to live

  in a four-bedroom house. Back then, there had been half as

  many people in the United States and Canada as there were

  now. There had been more unemployment, much more economic

  uncertainty, and far fewer automated jobs. The percentage of

  people doing physical labor for a living--simple construction,

  crop maintenance and harvesting, digging ditches and hard

  work like that--had been ten times greater then than it was now.

  Most of the people doing such labor today belonged to religious

  sects or one of the Wendell Barry farming communes.

  Back then, Roald and Letitia would have been considered

  gifted children with a bright future.

  She thought about the pictures and the feeling of the past,

  and wondered if Reena hadn't been right.

  She would be a perfect old woman.

  Her mother came into her room while Letitia was putting up her hair. She stood in the door frame. It was obvious she had

  been crying. Letitia watched her reflection in the mirror of her

  grandmother's dressing table, willed to her four years before.

  "Yes?" she asked softly, ageless bobby pins in her mouth.

  'lt was more my idea than your father's," Jane said,

  stepping closer, hands folded before her. "I mean, I am your

  mother. We've never really talked about this."

  "No," Letitia said.

  "So why now?"

  "Maybe I'm growing up."

  "Yes." Jane looked at the soft and flickering pictures hung

  on the walls, pastel scenes of improbable forests. "When I was pregnant with you, I was very afraid. I worried we'd made the

  wrong decision, going against what everybody else seemed to

  think and what everybody was advising or being advised. But I

  carried you and felt you move.., and I knew you were ours,

  and ours alone, and that we were responsible for you body and

  soul. I was your mother, not the doctors."

  Letitia looked up with mixed anger and frustration.., and

  love.

  "And now I see you. I think back to what I might have

  felt, if I were your age again, in your position. I might be mad,

  too. Roald hasn't had time to feel different yet; he's too young.

  I just came up here to tell you; I know that what I did was right,

  not for us, not for them"--she indicated the broad world beyond

  the walls of the house--' 'but right for you. It will work out. It

  really will." She put her hands on Letitia's shoulders. "They

  aren't having an easy time either. You know that." She stopped

  for a moment, then from behind her back revealed a book with

  a soft brown cover. "I brought this to show you again. You

  remember Great-Grandma? Her grandmother came all the way

  from Ireland, along with her grandpa." Jane gave her the

  album. Reluctantly, Letitia opened it up. There were real

  photographs inside, on paper, ancient black and white and faded

  color. Her great-grandmother did not much resemble Grandmother,

  who had been big-boned, heavy-set. Great-grandmother

  looked as if she had been skinny all her life. "You keep this,"

  Jane said. "Think about it for a while."

  The morning came with planned rain. Letitia took the

  half-empty metro to school, looking at the terraced and gardened

  and occasionally neglected landscape of the extended suburbs

  through raindrop-smeared glass. She came onto the school

  grounds and went to one of the older buildings in the school,

  where there was a little-used old-fashioned lavatory. This sometimes

  served as her sanctuary. She stood in a white stall and breathed deeply for a few minutes, then went to a sink and

  washed her hands as if conducting some ritual. Slowly, reluctantly,

  she looked at herself in the cracked mirror. A janitorial worker

  went about its duties, leaving behind the fresh, steamy smell of

  clean fixtures.

  The early part of the day was a numb time. Letitia began to

  fear her own distance from feeling, from the people around her.

  She might at any minute step into the old lavatory and simply

  fade from the present, find herself sixty years back...

  And what would she really think of that?

  In her third period class she received a note requesting that

  she appear in Rutger's counseling office as soon as was convenient.

  That was shorthand for immediately; she gathered up her

  mods and caught Reena's unreadable glance as she walked past.

  Rutger was a handsome man of forty-three (the years were

  registered on his desk life clock, an affect
ation of some of the

  older PPCs) with a broad smile and a garish taste in clothes. He

  was head of the counseling department and generally well-liked

  in the school. He shook her hand as she entered the counseling

  office and offered her a chair. "Now. You wanted to talk to

  me?"

  "I guess," Letitia said.

  "Problems?" His voice was a pleasant baritone; he was

  probably a fairly good singer. That had been a popular trait in

  the early days of PPCs.

  "The ACs say it's my attitude."

  "And what about it?"

  "I... am ugly. I am the ugliest girl.., the only girl in this

  school who is ugly."

  Rutger nodded. "I don't think you're ugly, but which is

  worse, being unique or being ugly?" Letitia lifted the corner of

  one lip in snide acknowledgment of the funny.

  "Everybody's unique now," she said.

  "That's what we teach. Do you believe it?"

  "No," she said. "Everybody's the same. I'm..." She

  shook her head. She resented Rutger prying up the pavement

  over her emotions. "I'm TB. I wouldn't mind being a PPC, but

  I'm not."

  "I think it's a minor problem," Rutger said quickly. He

  hadn't even sat down; obviously he was not going to give her

  much time.

  "It doesn't feel minor," she said, anger poking through

  the cracks he had made.

  "Oh, no. Being young often means that minor problems

  feel major. You feel envy and don't like yourself, at least not

  the way you look. Well, looks can be helped by diet, or at the

  very least by time. If I'm any judge, you'll look fine when

  you're older. And I am something of a judge. As for the way

  the others feel about you... I was a freak once."

  Letitia looked up at him.

  "Certainly. Bona fide. Much more of a freak than you.

  There are ten NGs like yourself in this school now. When I was

  your age, I was the only PPC in my school. There was still

  suspicion and even riots. Some PPCs were killed in one school

  when parents stormed the grounds."

  Letitia stared.

  "The other kids hated me. I wasn't bad-looking, but they

  knew. They had parents who told them PPCs were Frankenstein

  monsters. Do you remember the Rifkin Society? They're still

  around, but they're extreme fringies now. Just as well. They

  thought I'd been grown in a test tube somewhere and hatched

  out of an incubator. You've never experienced real hatred, I

  suspect. I did."

  "You were nice-looking," Letitia said. "you knew sone-body

  would like you eventually, maybe even love you. But what about me? Because of what I am, the way I look, who will ever

  want me? And will a PPC ever want to be with a Dingy?"

  She knew these were hard questions and Rutger made no

  pretense of answering them. "Say it all works out for the

  worst," he said. "You end up a spinster and no one ever loves

  you. You spend the rest of your days alone, Is that what you're

  worded about?"

  Her eyes widened. She had never quite thought those

  things through. Now she really hurt.

  "Everybody out there is choosing beauty for their kids.

  They're choosing slender, athletic bodies and fine minds. You

  have a fine mind, but you don't have an athletic body. Or so

  you seem to be convinced; I have no record of you ever trying

  out for athletics. So when you're out in the adult world, sure,

  you'll look different. But why can't that be an advantage? You

  may be surprised how hard we PPCs try to be different. And

  how hard it is, since tastes vary so little in our parents. You

  have that built in."

  Letitia listened, but the layers of paving were closing

  again. "Icing on the cake," she said.

  Rutger regarded her with his shrewd blue eyes and shrugged.

  "Come back in a month and talk to me," he said. "Until then,

  I think autocounselors will do fine."

  Little was said at dinner and less after. She went upstairs

  and to bed at an early hour, feeling logy and hoping for escape.

  Her father did his usual bed check an hour after she had put

  on her pajamas and lain down. "Rolled tight?" he asked.

  "Mmph," she replied.

  "Sleep tighter," he said. Rituals and formulas. Her life

  had been shaped by parents who were comfortable with nightly

  rituals and formulas.

  Almost immediately after sleep, or so it seemed, she came abruptly awake. She sat up in bed and realized where she was,

  and who, and began to cry. She had had the strangest and most

  beautiful dream, the finest ever without a dream mod. She

  could not remember details now, try as she might, but waking

  was almost more than she could bear.

  In the first period class, Georgia Fischer blitzed yet again

  and had to go to the infirmary. Letitia watched the others and

  saw a stony general cover-up of feelings. Edna Corman excused

  herself in second period and came back with red puffy eyes and

  pink cheeks. The tension built through the rest of the day until

  she wondered how anyone could concentrate. She did her own

  studying without any conviction; she was still wrapped in the

  dream, trying to decide what it meant.

  In eighth period, she once again sat behind John Lockwood.

  It was as if she had completed a cycle beginning in the morning

  and ending with her last class. She looked at her watch

  anxiously. Once again, they had Mr. Brant supervising. He

  seemed distracted, as if he, too, had had a dream, and it hadn't

  been as pleasant as hers.

  Brant had them cut mods mid-period and begin a discussion

  on what had been learned. These were the so-called

  integrative moments when the media learning was fixed by

  social interaction; Letitia found these periods a trial at the best

  of times. The others discussed their economics, Reena Cathcart

  as usual standing out in a class full of dominant personalities.

  John Lockwood listened intently, a small smile on his face

  as he presented a profile to Letitia. He seemed about to turn

  around and talk to her. She placed her hand on the corner of

  her console and lifted her finger to attract his attention.

  He glanced at her hand, turned away, and with a shudder

  looked at it again, staring this time, eyes widening. His mouth

  began to work as if her hand was the most horrible thing he had ever seen. His chin quivered, then his shoulder, and

  before Letitia could react he stood up and moaned. His legs

  went liquid beneath him and he fell to the console, arms

  hanging, then slid to the floor. On the floor, John Lockwood--who

  had never done such a thing in his life--twisted and

  groaned and shivered, locked in a violent blitz.

  Brant pressed the class emergency button and came around

  his desk. Before he could reach Lockwood, the boy became

  still, eyes open, one hand letting go its tight grip on the leg of

  his seat. Letitia could not move, watching his empty eyes; he

  appeared so horribly limp.

  Brant grabbed the boy by the shoulders, swearing steadily,

  and dragged him outside the classroom. Letitia followed them

/>   into the hall, wanting to help. Edna Corman and Reena Cathcart

  stood beside her, faces blank. Other students followed, staying

  well away from Brant and the boy.

  Brant lowered John Lockwood to the concrete and began

  pounding his chest and administering mouth-to-mouth. He pulled

  a syringe from his coat pocket and uncapped it, shooting its full

  contents into the boy's skin just below the sternum. Letitia

  focused on the syringe, startled. Right in his pocket; not in the

  first-aid kit.

  The full class stood in the hallway, silent, in shock. The

  medical arrived, Rutger following; it scooped John Lockwood

  onto its gurney and swung around, lights flashing. "Have you

  administered KVN?" the robot asked Brant.

  "Yes. Five cc's. Direct to heart."

  Room after room came out to watch, all the PPCs fixing

  their eyes on the burdened medical as it rolled down the hall.

  Edna Corman cried. Reena glanced at Letitia and turned away

  as if ashamed.

  "That's five," Rutger said, voice tired beyond grimness.

  Brant looked at him, then at the class, and told them they were dismissed. Letitia hung back. Brant screwed up his face in grief

  and anger. "Go! Get out of here!"

  She ran. The last thing she heard Rutger say was, "More

  this week than last."

  Letitia sat in the empty white lavatory, wiping her eyes,

  ashamed at her sniveling. She wanted to react like a grown-up--she

  saw herself being calm, cool, offering help to whoever

  might have needed it in the classroom--but the tears and

  the shaking would not stop.

  Mr. Brant had seemed angry, as if the entire classroom were

  at fault. Not only was Mr. Brant adult, he was PPC.

  So did she expect adults, especially adult PPCs, to behave

  better?

  Wasn't that what it was all about?

  She stared at herself in the cracked mirror. "I should go

  home, or go to the library and study," she said. Dignity and

  decorum. Two girls walked into the lavatory, and her private

  moment passed.

  Letitia did not go to the library. Instead, she went to the

  old concrete and steel auditorium, entering through the open

  stage entrance, standing in darkness in the wings. Three female