Women in Deep Time (3 page)

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 grownup—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 students sat in the front row, below the stage level and about ten meters
away from Letitia. She recognized Reena but not the other two; they did not share classes with her.

“Did you know him?”

“No, not very well,” Reena said. “He was in my class.”

“No ducks!” the third snorted.

“Trish, keep it
interior,
please. Reena’s had it rough.”

“He hadn’t blitzed. He wasn’t a superwhiz. Nobody expected it.”

“When was his incept?”

“I don’t know,” Reena said. “We’re all about the same age, within a couple of months. We’re all the same model year, same supplements, if it’s something in the genotype, in the supplements…”

“I heard somebody say there had been five so far. I haven’t heard anything,” the third said.

“I haven’t either,” said the second.

“Not in our school,” Reena said. “Except for the superwhizes. And none of them have died before now.”

Letitia stepped back in the darkness, hand on mouth. Had Lockwood actually died?

She thought for a mad moment of stepping out of the wings, going into the seats and telling the three she was sorry. The impulse faded fast. That would have been intruding.

They weren’t any older than she was, and they didn’t sound much more mature. They sounded scared.

In the morning, at the station room for pre-med secondary, Brant told them that John Lockwood had died the day before. “He had a heart attack,” Brant said. Letitia intuited that was not the complete truth. A short eulogy was read, and special hours for psych counseling were arranged for those students who felt they might need it.

The word “blitzing” was not mentioned by Brant, nor by any of the PPCs throughout that day. Letitia tried to research the subject but found precious few materials in the libraries accessed by her mod. She presumed she didn’t know where to look; it was hard to believe that
nobody
knew what was happening.

The dream came again, even stronger, the next night, and Letitia awoke out of it cold and shivering with excitement. She saw herself standing before a crowd, no single face visible, for she was in light and they were in darkness. She had felt, in the dream, an almost unbearable happiness, grief mixed with joy, unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She
loved
and did not know what she loved—not the crowd, precisely, not a man, not a family member, not even herself.

She sat up in her bed, hugging her knees, wondering if anybody else was awake. It seemed possible she had never been awake until now; every nerve was alive. Quietly, not wanting anybody else to intrude on this moment, she slipped out of bed and walked down the hall to her mother’s sewing room. There, in a full-length cheval mirror, she looked at herself as if with new eyes.

“Who are you?” she whispered. She lifted her cotton nightshirt and stared at her legs. Short calves, lumpy knees, thighs not bad—not fat, at any rate. Her arms were softlooking, not muscular, but not particularly plump, a rosy vanilla color with strawberry blotches on her elbows where she leaned on them while reading in bed. She had Irish
ancestors on her mother’s side; that showed in her skin color, recessed cheekbones, broad face. On her father’s side, Mexican and German; not much evidence in her of the Mexican. Her brother looked more swarthy. “We’re mongrels,” she said. “I look like a mongrel compared to PPC purebreds.” But PPCs were not purebred; they were
designed.

She lifted her nightshirt higher still, pulling it over her head finally and standing naked. Shivering from the cold and from the memory of her dream, she forced herself to focus on all of her characteristics. Whenever she had seen herself naked in mirrors before, she had blurred her eyes at one feature, looked away from another, special-effecting her body into a more acceptable fantasy. Now she was in a mood to know herself for what she was.

Broad hips, strong abdomen—plump, but strong. From her pre-med, she knew that meant she would probably have little trouble bearing children. “Brood mare,” she said, but there was no critical sharpness in the words. To have children, she would have to attract men, and right now there seemed little chance of that. She did not have the “Attraction Peaks” so often discussed on the TV, or seen faddishly headlined on the LitVid mods; the culturally prescribed geometric curves allocated to so few naturally, and now available to so many by design.
Does Your Child Have the Best Design for Success?

Such a shocking triviality. She felt a righteous anger grow—another emotion she was not familiar with—and sucked it back into the excitement, not wanting to lose her mood. “I might never look at myself like this again,” she whispered.

Her breasts were moderate in size, the left larger than the right and more drooping. She could indeed hold a stylus under her left breast, something a PPC female would not have to worry about for decades, if ever. Rib cage not really distinct; muscles not distinct; rounded, soft, gentle-looking, face curious, friendly, wide-eyed, skin blemished but not so badly it wouldn’t recover on its own; feet long and toenails thick, heavily cuticled. She had never suffered from ingrown toenails.

Her family line showed little evidence of tendency to cancer—correctible now, but still distressing—or heart disease or any of the other diseases of melting pot cultures, of mobile populations and changing habits. She saw a strong body in the mirror, one that would serve her well.

And she also saw that with a little makeup, she could easily play an older woman. Some shadow under the eyes, lines to highlight what would in thirty or forty years be jowls, laugh lines…

But she did not look old
now.

Letitia walked back to her room, treading carefully on the carpet. In the room, she asked the lights to turn on, lay down on the bed, pulled the photo album Jane had given her from the top of her nightstand and gingerly turned the delicate black paper pages. She stared at her great-grandmother’s face, and then at the picture of her grandmother as a little girl.

Individual orchestra was taught by three instructors in one of the older drama classrooms behind the auditorium. It was a popular aesthetic; the school’s music boxes were better than most home units, and the instructors were very popular. All were PPCs.

After a half hour of group, each student could retire to box keyboard, order up
spheres of countersound to avoid cacophony, and practice.

Today, she practiced for less than half an hour. Then, tongue between her lips, she stared into empty space over the keyboard. “Countersound off, please,” she ordered, and stood up from the black bench. Mr. Teague, the senior instructor, asked if she were done for the day.

“I have to run an errand,” she said.

“Practice your polyrhythms,” he advised.

She left the classroom and walked around to the auditorium’s stage entrance. She knew Reena’s drama group would be meeting there.

The auditorium was dark, the stage lighted by a few catwalk spots. The drama group sat in a circle of chairs in one illuminated corner of the stage, reading lines aloud from old paper scripts. Hands folded, she walked toward the group. Rick Fayette, a quiet senior with short black hair, spotted her first but said nothing, glancing at Reena. Reena stopped reading her lines, turned, and stared at Letitia. Edna Corman saw her last and shook her head, as if this were the last straw.

“Hello,” Letitia said.

“What are you doing here?” There was more wonder than disdain in Reena’s voice.

“I thought you might still…” She shook her head.

“Probably not. But I thought you might still be able to use me.”

“Really,”
Edna Corman said.

Reena put her script down and stood. “Why’d you change your mind?”

“I thought I wouldn’t mind being an old lady,” Reena said. “It’s just not that big a deal. I brought a picture of my great-grandmother.” She took a plastic wallet from her pocket and opened it to a copy she had made from the photo in the album. “You could make me up like this. Like my great-grandmother.”

Reena took the wallet. “You look like her,” she said.

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Look at this,” Reena said, holding the picture out to the others. They gathered around and passed the wallet from hand to hand, staring in wonder. Even Edna Corman glanced at it briefly. “She actually
looks
like her great-grandmother.”

Rick Fayette whistled with wonder. “You,” he said, “will make a really great old lady.”

Rutger called her into his office abruptly a week later. She sat quietly before his desk. “You’ve joined the drama class after all,” he said. She nodded.

“Any reason?”

There was no simple way to express it. “Because of what you told me,” she said.

“No friction?”

“It’s going okay.”

“Very good. They gave you another role to play?”

“No. I’m the old lady. They’ll use makeup on me.”

“You don’t object to that?”

“I don’t think so.”

Rutger seemed to want to find something wrong, but he couldn’t. With a faintly suspicious smile, he thanked her for her time. “Come back and see me whenever you want,” he said. “Tell me how it goes.”

The group met each Friday, an hour later than her individual orchestra. Letitia made arrangements for home keyboard hookup and practice. After a reading and a half hour of questions, she obtained the permission of the drama group advisor, a spinsterish non-PPC seldom seen in the hallways, Miss Darcy. Miss Darcy seemed old-fashioned and addressed all of her students as either “Mister” or “Miss,” but she knew drama and stagecraft. She was the oldest of the six NG teachers in the school.

Reena stayed with Letitia during the audition and made a strong case for her late admittance, saying that the casting of Rick Fayette as an older woman was not going well. Fayette was equally eager to be rid of the part; he had another nonconflicting role, and the thought of playing two characters in this production worried him.

Fayette confessed his appreciation at their second Friday meeting. He introduced her to an elfishly handsome, largeeyed, slender group member, Frank Leroux. Leroux was much too shy to go on stage, Fayette said, but he would be doing their makeup. “He’s pretty amazing.”

Letitia stood nervously while Leroux examined her. “You’ve really got a
face,”
he said softly. “May I touch you, to see where your contours are?”

Letitia giggled and abruptly sobered, embarrassed. “Okay,” she said. “You’re going to draw lines and make shadows?”

“Much more than that,” Leroux said.

“He’ll take a video of your face in motion,” Fayette said. “Then he’ll digitize it and sculpt a laserfoam mold—much better than sitting for a life mask. He made a life mask of
me
last year to turn me into the Hunchback of Notre Dame. No fun at all.”

“This way is much better,” Leroux said, touching her skin delicately, poking under her cheeks and chin, pulling back her hair to feel her temples. “I can make two or three sculptures showing what your face and neck are like when they’re in different positions. Then I can adjust the appliance molds for flex and give.”

“When he’s done with you, you won’t know yourself,” Fayette said.

“Reena says you have a picture of your great-grandmother. May I see it?” Leroux asked. She gave him the wallet and he looked at the picture with squint-eyed intensity. “What a wonderful face,” he said. “I never met my great-grandmother. My own grandmother looks about as old as my mother. They might be sisters.”

“When he’s done with you,” Fayette said, his enthusiasm becoming a bit tiresome, “you and your
great-grandmother
will look like sisters!”

When she went home that evening, taking a late pay metro from the school, she wondered just exactly what she was doing. Throughout her high school years, she had cut herself off from most of her fellow students; the closest she came to friendship had been occasional banter while sitting at the mods with John Lockwood, waiting for instructors to arrive. Now she actually liked Fayette, and strange Leroux, whose hands were thin and pale and strong and slightly cold. Leroux was a PPC, but obviously his parents had different tastes; was he a superwhiz? Nobody had said so; perhaps it was a matter of honor among PPCs that they pretended not to care about their classifications.