“Wait a minute,” Caroline says. She leans on her cane. “You thought we brought Deborah here to bioenhance her?” Caroline starts to laugh. She puts her hand on her face. “Oh my God!”
Caroline’s mother calls from the top of the stairs, “I’m phoning the police.”
Caroline says, very fast, “Go bring her down here, James. You’ll have to lift her out of her chair and carry her. Keith, get her chair.” The two men run up the stairs.
Caroline is shaking. I stand beside her. I growl. The woman still has the gun. She points the gun at Caroline. I wait for Caroline to tell me Attack.
The woman says, “Don’t try to deny it. You’d do anything for ballet, wouldn’t you? All of you. You’re sick—but you’re not murdering my daughter!”
Caroline’s face changes. Her smell changes. I feel her hand on my head. Her hand shakes. Her body shakes. I smell anger bigger than other angers. I wait for Attack.
Deborah says, “You’re all wrong, Mom! Just like you always are! Does this look like a bioenhancement lab? Does it? These people aren’t enhancing me—they’re trying to talk me out of it! These two guys are doctors and they’re trying to ‘deprogram’ me—just like you tried to program me all my life! You never wanted me to dance, you always tried to make me into this cute little college-bound student that you needed me to be. Never what I needed!”
The men carry Caroline’s mother and Caroline’s mother’s chair down the steps. They put Caroline’s mother in the chair. Caroline’s mother also smells angry. But Caroline smells more angry than everybody.
Caroline says, “Sound familiar, Mother dear? What Deborah’s saying? What did you learn at the genetic conference? What I’ve been telling you for months, right? Your gift to dance is dying. Because you wanted a prima ballerina at any price. Even if I’m the one to pay it.” Caroline’s mother says, “You love dance. You wanted it as much as I did. You were a star.”
“I never got to find out if I would have been one anyway! That isn’t so inconceivable, is it? And then I might have still been dancing! But instead I was . . . made. Molded, sewed, carpentered. Into what you needed me to be.”
Deborah’s mother lowers her gun. Her eyes are big. Caroline’s mother says, “You were a star. You had a good run. Without me, you might have been nothing. Worthless.”
A man says, very soft, “Jesus H. Christ.”
Caroline is shaking hard. I am afraid she will fall again. Her hand is on her cane. The cane shakes. Her other hand is on me.
Caroline says, “You cold, self-centered bitch—”
A little girl runs down the stairs.
The little girl says, “Tante Annal Tante Anna! Ou etes-vous?” She stops at the bottom of the steps. She smells afraid. “Qui sont tout ces gens?”
Caroline looks at the little girl. The little girl has no shoes. She has long black fur on her head. Her hind feet go out like Caroline’s feet when Caroline dances. The toes look strange. I don’t understand the little girl’s feet.
Caroline says again, “You cold, self-centered bitch.” Her voice is soft now. She stops shaking. “When did you have her made? Five years ago? Six? A new model with improved features? Who will decay all the sooner?”
Caroline’s mother says, “You are a hysterical fool.”
Caroline says, “Angel—attack. Now.”
I attack Caroline’s mother. I knock over the chair. I bite her foreleg. Someone screams, “Caroline! For God’s sake! Caroline!” I bite Caroline’s mother’s head. I must protect Caroline. This person hurts Caroline. I must protect Caroline.
A gun fires and I hurt and hurt and hurt—
I love Caroline.
The town of Saratoga, where the American Ballet Theater is dancing its summer season, is itself a brightly colored stage. Visitors throng the racetrack, the brand-new Electronics Museum, the historical battle sites. In 1777, right here, Benedict Arnold and his half-trained revolutionaries stopped British forces under General John Burgoyne. It was the first great victory of freedom over the old order.
Until this year, the New York City Ballet danced here every summer. But the Performing Arts Center chose not to renew the City Ballet contract. In New York, too, City Ballet attendance is half of what it was only a few years ago.
The Saratoga pavillion is open to the countryside. Ballet lovers fill the seats, spread blankets up the sloping lawn, watch dancers accompanied not only by Tchaikovsky or Chopin but also by crickets and robins. In Saratoga, the ballet smells of freshly mown grass. The classic “white ballets”—Swan Lake, Les Sylphides—are remembered green. Small girls whose first taste of dance is at Saratoga will dream, for the rest of their life, of toe shoes skimming over wildflowers.
I take my seat, in the back of the regular seating, as the small orchestra finishes tuning up. The conductor enters to the usual thunderous applause, even though nobody here knows his name and very few care. They have come to see the dancers.
Debussy floats out over the countryside. Afternoon of a Faun: slow, melting. On the nearly bare stage, furnished only with barre and mirrors, a male dancer in practice clothes wakes up, stretches, warms up his muscles in a series of low, languorous moves.
A girl appears in the mirror, which isn’t really a mirror but an empty place in the backdrop. A void. She, too, stretches, poses, plies. Both dancers watch the mirrors. They are so absorbed in their own reflections that they only gradually become aware of each other’s presence. Even then, they exist for each other only as foils, presences to dance to. In the end the girl will step back through the mirror. There is the feeling that for the boy, she may not really have existed at all, except as a dream.
It is Deborah’s first lead in a one-act ballet. Her extension is high, her turnout perfect, her movements sure and strong and sustained, filled with the joy of dancing. I can barely stand to look at her. This is her reward, her grail, for continuing her bioenhancement. She isn’t dancing for Anton Privitera, but she is dancing. A year and a half of bioenhancement, bought legally now in Copenhagen and paid for by selling her story to an eager press, has given her the physical possibilities to match her musicality, and her rhythm, and her drive.
The faun finally touches the girl, turning her slowly en attitude. Deborah smiles. This is her afternoon. She’s willing to pay whatever price the night demands, even though science has no idea yet what, for her kind of treatments, it might be.
Privitera must have known that some of his dancers were bioenhanced. The completely inadequate bioscans at City Ballet, the phenomenally low injury rate of his prima ballerina—Privitera must have known. Or maybe his staff let him remain in official ignorance, keeping from him any knowledge of heresy in the ranks. There was a rumor that Privitera’s business manager John Coles even tried to keep Caroline from “deprogramming” dancers who wanted bioenhancement. The rumor about Coles was never substantiated. But in the last year, City Ballet has been struggling to survive. Too many patrons have withdrawn their favor. The mystique of natural art, like other mystiques, didn’t last forever. It had a good run.
“If you could have chosen, and that was the only way you could have had the career, would you have chosen the embryonic engineering anyway?” was the sole thing Deborah asked Caroline in jail, through bullet-proof plastic glass and electronic speaking systems, under the hard eyes of matrons. Caroline, awaiting trial for second-degree murder, didn’t seem to mind Deborah’s brusqueness, her self-absorption. Caroline was silent a long time, her gaunt face lengthened from the girlish roundness I remembered. Then she said to Deborah, “No.”
“I would,” Deborah said.
Caroline only looked at her.
They’re here, Caroline and her dog. Somewhere up on the grass, Caroline in a powerchair, Angel hobbling on the three legs my bullet left him. Caroline was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. They didn’t let Angel stay with her during the trial. Nor did they let him testify, which would have been abnormal but not impossible. Five-year-olds can testify under some ci
rcumstances, and Angel has the biochip-and-reengineered intelligence of a five-year-old. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so abnormal. Or maybe all of us, not just Anton Privitera, will have to change our definition of abnormal.
Five-year-olds know a lot. It was Marguerite who cried out, “Vous avez assassine ma tante Anna!” She knew whom I was aiming at, even if the police did not. But Marguerite couldn’t know how much I loathed the old woman who had made her daughter into what the mother needed her to be—just as I, out of love, had tried to do to mine.
On stage Deborah pirouettes. Maybe her types of bioenhancement will be all right, despite the growing body of doubts collected by Caroline’s doctor allies. When the first cures for cancer were developed from reengineered retroviruses, dying and desperate patients demanded they be administered without long, drawn-out FDA testing. Some of the patients died even sooner, possibly from the cures. Some lived until ninety. The edge of anything is a lottery, and protection doesn’t help— not against change, or madmen, or errors of judgement. I protect Caroline, Angel kept saying after I shot him, yelping in pain between sentences. I protect Caroline.
Deborah flows into a retire, one leg bent at the knee, and rises on toe. Her face glows. Her partner lifts her above his head and turns her slowly, her feet perfectly arched in their toe shoes, dancing on air.
Nancy Kress, Beaker's Dozen
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