Act One Read online

  Act One

  Nancy Kress

  published by Phoenix Pick

  An Imprint of Arc Manor

  P. O. Box 10339

  Rockville, MD 20849-0339

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  Act One copyright 2009 by Nancy Kress. All rights reserved. This story first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. All rights reserved. This book may not be copied or reproduced, in whole or in part, by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual persons, events or localities is purely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author and publisher.

  This book is presented as is, without any warranties (implied or otherwise) as to the accuracy of the production, text or translation.

  ISBN (Digital Edition): 978-1-60450-413-2

  ISBN (Paper Edition): 978-1-60450-455-2

  Visit the Author’s Website at:

  www.sff.net/people/nankress/

  BREEDING FICTION

  by Nancy Kress

  Stories can grow out of anything: a fleeting thought, an overheard remark, a dream, a news item, a memory. Sometimes the writer has no idea where a particular story comes from. It just suddenly seems present, like air. Usually, however, stories grow from a combination of elements that arrive in the mind from different places and at different times. “Act One” is such a hybrid. Four germ cells cross-fertilized to produce it.

  The first was my long-standing interest in genetic engineering, as well as a long-standing frustration that it is often written about so badly. Recombining genes will produce monsters without souls. No—it will produce supermen. No—it will produce a rigidly stratified society locked in by genetics, as in Brave New World. No—it will save humankind. No—it will be used for women to eliminate men, or blonds to eliminate redheads, or some mad scientist in a basement to eliminate everybody.

  The much more likely scenario is that genetic engineering, like medicine and physics, will lurch forward in fits and starts. It will make some mistakes. It will create some benefits. It will have some unforeseen consequences. This is already happening, because a genome is not a destiny. A hundred other influences determine what turns genes on and off in a given individual, as the burgeoning science of epigenetics proves every day. So I wanted to write a story in which a deliberate change to the human genome results in ambiguous outcomes for multiple characters.

  Such a goal is not a story, however. A story has specific characters and a specific situation. The second element that ultimately produced “Act One” was an image of two people groping their way down a grimy basement staircase. I didn’t know anything about one of them, but I knew the second was a middle-aged woman of fragile beauty and iron will. She was an actress. I could see her quite clearly, although not why she was descending into that basement.

  A few weeks later I was poking around the public library, scanning the shelf of NEW NON-FICTION. It held a book on dwarfism. The book seemed to be really well-written so I checked it out. After a few pages, I knew who the second person on the staircase was. Over the next few weeks I read two more books on dwarfism. Writers do this: read six times as much verbiage in research than the length of the eventual story. I read a book by a journalist, one by a dwarf, one by the average-sized father of a dwarf daughter. They were all fascinating.

  The final piece of my story came during a chess match. I play a lot of chess, and I play it very badly. My usual chess partner, Marty, and I will play several games in a row, accompanied by chess trash talk (“Don’t think that’s a move that impresses me!” “You think I don’t see the bishop moving up? In your dreams!”) My toy poodle, Cosette, watches us distrustfully, and somehow she always knows when it’s the last game of the evening, sometimes even before we do. How does she know? What clues is she reading?

  Once Marty and I asked each other this question, the entire story of “Act One” solidified in my mind. I knew what genetic engineering change it would concern, to whom it would happen, why, and with what consequences. The actual writing then went swiftly.

  Not all my stories are grown this way. Sometimes the soil is less fertile. Sometimes I just can’t quite come up with enough inventive rain to keep the thing alive. Sometimes the result is puny and pale.

  But, then, literary cross-breeding is just as chancy as the biological kind. And we lurch forward anyway.

  ***

  “To understand whose movie it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.”

  — Joan Didion

  ***

  ACT ONE

  I eased down the warehouse’s basement steps behind the masked boy, one hand on the stair rail, wishing I’d worn gloves. Was this level of grime really necessary? It wasn’t; we’d already passed through some very sophisticated electronic surveillance, as well as some very unsophisticated personal surveillance that stopped just short of a body-cavity search, although an unsmiling man did feel around inside my mouth. Soap cost less than surveillance, so probably the grime was intentional. The Group was making a statement. That’s what we’d been told to call them: “The Group.” Mysterious, undefined, pretentious.

  The stairs were lit only by an old-fashioned forty-watt bulb somewhere I couldn’t see. Behind me, Jane’s breath quickened. I’d insisted on going down first, right behind our juvenile guide, from a sense of—what? “Masculine protection” from me would be laughable. And usually I like to keep Jane where I can see her. It works out better that way.

  “Barry?” she breathed. The bottom of the steps was so shrouded in gloom that I had to feel my way with one extended foot.

  “Two more steps, Janie.”

  “Thank you.”

  Then we were down and she took a deep breath, standing closer to me than she usually does. Her breasts were level with my face. Jane is only five-six, but that’s seventeen inches taller than I am. The boy said, “A little way more.”

  Across the cellar a door opened, spilling out light. “There.”

  It had been a laundry area once, perhaps part of an apartment for some long-dead maintenance man. Cracked wash tubs, three of them, sagged in one corner. No windows, but the floor had been covered with a clean, thin rug and the three waiting people looked clean, too. I scanned them quickly. A tall, hooded man holding an assault rifle, his eyes the expression of bodyguards everywhere: alert but nonanalytic. An unmasked woman in jeans and baggy sweater, staring at Jane with unconcealed resentment. Potential trouble there. And the leader, who came forward with his hand extended, smiling. “Welcome, Miss Snow. We’re honored.”

  I recognized him immediately. He was a type rampant in political life, which used to be my life. Big, handsome, too pleased with himself and his position to accurately evaluate either. He was the only one not wearing jeans, dressed in slacks and a sports coat over a black turtleneck. If he had been a pol instead of a geno-terrorist, he’d have maybe gotten as far as city council executive, and then would have run for mayor, lost, and never understood why. So this was a low-level part of the Group’s operation, which was probably good. It might lessen the danger of this insane expedition.

&nbsp
; “Thank you,” Jane said in that famous voice, low and husky and as thrilling off screen as on. “This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

  I was more than her manager but the truth was too complicated to explain. The guy didn’t even glance at me and I demoted him from city council executive to ward captain. You always pay attention to the advisors. That’s usually where the brains are, if not the charisma.

  Ms. Resentful, on the other hand, switched her scrutiny from Jane to me. I recognized the nature of that scrutiny. I’ve felt it all my life.

  Jane said to the handsome leader, “What should I call you?”

  “Call me Ishmael.”

  Oh, give me a break. Did that make Jane the white whale? He was showing off his intellectual moves, with no idea they were both banal and silly. But Jane gave him her heart-melting smile and even I, who knew better, would have sworn it was genuine. She might not have made a movie in ten years, but she still had it.

  “Let’s sit down,” Ishmael said.

  Three kitchen chairs stood at the far end of the room. Ishmael took one, the bodyguard and the boy standing behind him. Ms. Resentful took another. Jane sank cross-legged to the rug in a graceful puddle of filmy green skirt.

  That was done for my benefit. My legs and spine hurt if I have to stand for more than a few minutes, and she knows how I hate sitting even lower than I already am. Ishmael, shocked and discerning nothing, said, “Miss Snow!”

  “I think better when I’m grounded,” she said, again with her irresistible smile. Along with her voice, that smile launched her career thirty-five years ago. Warm, passionate, but with an underlying wistfulness that bypassed the cerebrum and went straight to the primitive hind-brain. Unearned—she was born with those assets—but not unexploited. Jane was a lot shrewder than her fragile blonde looks suggested. The passion, however, was real. When she wanted something, she wanted it with every sinew, every nerve cell, every drop of her acquisitive blood.

  Now her graceful Sitting-Bull act left Ishmael looking awkward on his chair. But he didn’t do the right thing, which would have been to join her on the rug. He stayed on his chair and I demoted him even further, from ward captain to go-fer. I clambered up onto the third chair. Ishmael gazed down at Jane and swelled like a pouter pigeon at having her, literally, at his feet. Ms. Resentful scowled. Uneasiness washed through me.

  The Group knew who Jane Snow was. Why would they put this meeting in the hands of an inept narcissist? I could think of several reasons: to indicate contempt for her world. To preserve the anonymity of those who actually counted in this most covert of organizations. To pay off a favor that somebody owed to Ishmael, or to Ishmael’s keeper. To provide a photogenic foil to Jane, since of course we were being recorded. Any or all of these reasons would be fine with me. But my uneasiness didn’t abate.

  Jane said, “Let’s begin then, Ishmael, if it’s all right with you.”

  “It’s fine with me,” he said. His back was to the harsh light, which fell full on both Jane and Ms. Resentful. The latter had bad skin, small eyes, lanky hair, although her lips were lovely, full and red, and her neck above the windbreaker had the taut firmness of youth.

  The light was harder on Jane. It showed up the crow’s feet, the tired inelasticity of her skin under her flawless make-up. She was, after all, fifty-four, and she’d never gone under the knife. Also, she’d never been really beautiful, not as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones had once been beautiful. Jane’s features were too irregular, her legs and butt too heavy. But none of that mattered next to the smile, the voice, the green eyes fresh as new grass, and the powerful sexual glow she gave off so effortlessly. It’s as if Jane Snow somehow received two sets of female genes at conception, a critic wrote once, doubling everything we think of as “feminine.” That makes her either a goddess or a freak.

  “I’m preparing for a role in a new movie,” she said to Ishmael, although of course he already knew that. She just wanted to use her voice on him. “It’s going to be about your… your organization. And about the future of the little girls. I’ve talked to some of them and—”

  “Which ones?” Ms. Resentful demanded.

  Did she really know them all by name? I looked at her more closely. Intelligence in those small, stony eyes. She could be from The Group’s headquarter cell—wherever it was—and sent to ensure that Ishmael didn’t screw up this meeting. Or not. But if she were really intelligent, would she be so enamored of someone like Ishmael?

  Stupid question. Three of Jane’s four husbands had been gorgeous losers.

  Jane said, “Well, so far I’ve only talked to Rima Ridley-Jones. But Friday I have the whole afternoon with the Barrington twins.”

  Ishmael, unwilling to have the conversation migrate from him, said, “Beautiful children, those twins. And very intelligent.” As if the entire world didn’t already know that. Unlike most of The Group’s handiwork, the Barrington twins had been posed by their publicity-hound parents on every magazine cover in the world. But Jane smiled at Ishmael as if he’d just explicated Spinoza.

  “Yes, they are beautiful. Please, Ishmael, tell me about your organization. Anything that might help me prepare for my role in Future Perfect.”

  He leaned forward, hands on his knees, handsome face intent. Dramatically, insistently, he intoned, “There is one thing you must understand about the Group, Jane. A very critical thing. You will never stop us.”

  Portentous silence.

  The worst thing was, he might be right. The FBI, CIA, IRS, HPA, and several other alphabets had lopped off a few heads, but still the hydra grew. It had so many supporters: liberal lawmakers and politicians, who wanted the Anti-Genetic Modification Act revoked and the Human Protection Agency dismantled. The rich parents who wanted their embryos enhanced. The off-shore banks that coveted The Group’s dollars and the Caribbean or Mexican or who-knows-what islands that benefited from sheltering their mobile labs.

  “We are idealists,” Ishmael droned on, “and we are the future. Through our efforts, mankind will change for the better. Wars will end, cruelty will disappear. When people can—”

  “Let me interrupt you for just a moment, Ishmael.” Jane widened her eyes and over-used his name. Her dewy look up at him from the floor could have reversed desertification. She was pulling out all the stops. “I need so much to understand, Ishmael. If you genemod these little girls, one by one, you end up changing such a small percentage of the human race that… How many children have been engineered with Arlen’s Syndrome?”

  “We prefer the term ‘Arlen’s Advantage.’”

  “Yes, of course. How many children?”

  I held my breath. The Group had never given out that information.

  Jane put an entreating hand on Ishmael’s knee.

  He said loftily, hungrily, “That information is classified,” and I saw that he didn’t know the answer.

  Ms. Resentful said, “To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen.”

  Was she lying? My instincts—and I have very good instincts, although to say that in this context is clearly a joke—said no. Resentful knew the number. So she was higher up than Ishmael. And since she sure as hell wasn’t responding to Jane’s allure, that meant The Group now wanted the numbers made public.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Ishmael said hastily, “three thousand two hundred fourteen children.”

  Jane said, “But that’s not a high percentage out of six billion people on Earth, is it? It—”

  “Five billionth of one percent,” I said. A silly, self-indulgent display, but what the hell. My legs ached.

  She always could ad-lib. “Yes, thank you, Barry. But my question was for Ishmael. If only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses Arlen’s Advantage, even if the genemod turns out to be inheritable—”

  “It is,” Ishmael said, which was nonsense. The oldest Arlen’s kids were only twelve.

  “Wonderful!” Jane persisted. “But as I say, if only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses the Adv
antage, how can The Group hope to alter the entire human future?”

  Ishmael covered her hand with his. He smiled down at her, and his eyes actually twinkled. “Jane, Jane, Jane. Have you ever dropped a pebble into a pond?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what happened, my dear?”

  “A ripple.”

  “Which spread and spread until the entire pond was affected!” Ishmael spread his arms wide. The ass couldn’t even put together a decent analogy. Humanity was an ocean, not a pond, and water ripples were always transitory. But Jane, actress that she was, beamed at him and moved the conversation to something he could handle.

  “I see. Tell me, Ishmael, how you personally became involved in The Group.”

  He was thrilled to talk about himself. As he did, Jane skillfully extracted information about The Group’s make-up, its organization, its communications methods. Resentful let her do it. I watched the young woman, who was watching Ishmael but not in a monitoring sort of way. He couldn’t give away really critical information; he didn’t have any. Still, he talked too much. He was the kind of man who responded to an audience, who could easily become so expansive that he turned indiscreet. Sooner or later, I suspected, he would say something to somebody that he shouldn’t, and The Group would dump him.

  Ms. Resentful wasn’t anything near the actress Jane that was. Her hunger for this worthless man was almost palpable. I might have felt sympathy for her pain if my own wasn’t increasing so much in my legs, back, neck. I seldom sat this long, and never on a hard chair.

  My particular brand of dwarfism, achondroplasia, accounts for seventy percent of all cases. Malformed bones and cartilage produce not only the short limbs, big head and butt, and pushed-in face that all the media caricaturists so adore but also, in some of us, constriction of the spinal canal that causes pain. Especially as achons age, and I was only two years younger than Jane. Multiple excruciating operations have only helped me so much.