He said calmly, “I did not access Mr. Wayland’s medical records. Why did the nurse have to lead him to your feeding room?”
“Because he had Alzheimer’s, Dr. Aranow. He’d had it for fifteen years, long before the Change. Because your much-vaunted Cell Cleaner can’t repair damage to brain cells, can it, Doctor—only destroy abnormal ones. Which left him with fewer every year. Because he couldn’t find the feeding room, much less take off his own clothes and feed. Because his mind was gone and he was a drooling, vacuous, empty shell. Whose damaged brain finally just gave up and killed his body, even if it had been senselessly Changed!”
She breathed hard. Jackson knew she was goading him, daring him to say it: You killed him. Then she’d probably sue.
He didn’t let himself be provoked. After marriage to—and divorce from—Cazie Sanders, Ellie Lester was a stupid amateur. He said formally, “The cause of death will, of course, have to be made by the medical examiner for the City of New York, after autopsy. This preliminary report is concluded. Comlink, off.”
He put the link in his bag. Ellie Lester stood up; she was an inch taller than Jackson. He guessed the autopsy would show one of the Chinese or South American inhibitors that simply make the brain forget what to do, make it stop sending signals to the heart to beat or the lungs to breathe. Or maybe the autopsy wouldn’t show it, if the drug was enough ahead of the detection technology. How had she delivered it?
She said, “Perhaps our paths will cross again, Doctor.”
He knew better than to answer. On his mobile he made the call to the cops and took a last look at Harold Winthrop Wayland. The wall screen came on. The house system must have been pre-set.
“…final election results! President Stephen Stanley Garrison has been reelected by a narrow margin. The most startling feature of the results, however, is the number of Americans casting ballots. Of ninety million eligible voters, only eight percent voted. This represents a drop of—”
Ellie Lester gave a sharp crack of laughter. “ ‘Startling.’ God, he’s a disease. Why would anyone bother to vote anymore?”
“Maybe as an act of witty parody,” Jackson said, and knew that by his saying it, she’d won after all. And it was no comfort that she was too stupid to recognize that.
She didn’t see him out. Maybe Design had decided that manners, too, were irrelevant. But as he left the dead man’s bedroom, he looked closely for the first time at the small framed photos on the wall. All but the last were predigital copies, faded and uneven in color. Edward Jenner. Ignaz Semmelweiss. Jonas Salk. Stephen Clark Andrews. And Miranda Sharifi.
“Yes, he was a doctor, too,” Ellie Lester said maliciously. “Back when you people were really necessary. And those are his heroes—four Livers and a Sleepless. Wouldn’t you know?” She laughed.
Jackson let himself out. The holo of the black man had been replaced by a naked Roman slave, heavily muscled, handsome but clearly not genemod. A Liver. The slave knelt as Jackson passed, lowered his eyes, and opened his mouth. Translucent manacles of holographic gold bound him to Ellie Lester’s doorknob.
“She’s the far end of a bell-shaped curve, I know that,” Jackson said to his sister Theresa. “So it shouldn’t bother me. Actually, it doesn’t bother me.”
“It bothers you,” Theresa said in her gentle voice. “And it should.”
They sat in the atrium of their apartment, having drinks before dinner, which would be old-fashioned mouth food. The atrium wall facing the park was a transparent Y-shield. Four stories below, Central Park rioted with autumn color under its invisible energy dome. The Manhattan enclaves had recently voted to restore modified seasons, although the vote had been close. Above the shield the November sky was the color of ashes.
Theresa wore a loose flowered dress that fell in graceful folds to her ankles; Jackson had the vague impression that it was out of fashion. Her face, without makeup, was a pale oval under her silvery blonde hair. She was twelve years younger than Jackson’s thirty.
Theresa was fragile. Not in her slender genemod body, but in her mind. Jackson’s private belief was that something had gone wrong during her embryonic engineering, as something sometimes did. Genemod was a complicated process, and once the zygote had become blastomeres, no further permanent engineering was possible. Not, at least, by anyone on Earth.
As a child Theresa had hated to go to school and had clung, weeping in a quiet and hopeless way, to her bewildered mother. She didn’t like to play with other children. For days she stayed in her room, drawing or listening to music. Sometimes she said she wanted to wrap herself in the music and melt into it until there wasn’t any more Theresa. Medical tests showed high reactivity in her stress-hormone response system: high cortisol levels, enlarged adrenal glands, the heart rate and gut motility and nerve-cell death associated with presuicidal depression. Her threshold for limbic-hypothalamic arousal was very low; she found anything new intensely threatening.
In an age of custom-engineered biogenic amines, nobody had to stay fragile. Throughout Theresa’s girlhood she had been on and off neuropharms to rebalance her brain chemistry. The Cell Cleaner would have made that problematic, since it destroyed everything in the body that it decided didn’t belong there, that didn’t match either the DNA patterns or approved set of molecules stored in its tiny, unimaginable, protein-based computers lodged in and between human cells. But by the time the Change brought the Cell Cleaner, it no longer mattered. At thirteen Theresa announced—no, that was too strong a word for Theresa, she never “announced”—she had said that she was finished with neuropharms “for good.”
By that time, their parents had both died in an aircar crash and Jackson was his sister’s guardian. Jackson had argued, reasoned, begged. It had done no good. Theresa would not be helped. She didn’t argue back; intellectual debate confused her. She simply refused to allow a medical solution to her medical problems.
However, at least she didn’t—Jackson’s secret fear—attempt suicide. She became even more reclusive and more elusive, one of those gentle pale women from an entirely different century. Theresa embroidered. She studied music. She was writing a life of the martyred Sleepless woman, Leisha Camden, of all irrelevant pursuits—another woman who had been entirely eclipsed by a different generation of far more ruthless females.
When the Change occurred, Theresa was the only person Jackson knew who refused the syringe. She could not ground-feed. She could become infected by viruses and bacteria, and did. She could be poisoned by toxins. She could get cancer.
Sometimes, in his darker moods, he thought that his sister’s elusive neurological frailties, so divorced from her intelligent sweetness, were the reason he’d become a doctor. Just lately it had occurred to him that Theresa’s frailties were also the reason he’d married someone like Cazie.
Watching his sister pour herself another fruit juice—she never drank sunshine, alcohol, or any of the synthetic endorphin drinks like Endorkiss—Jackson thought that it was wrong to have his life so shaped by a younger sister who was softly, stubbornly, unnecessarily crazy. That he was weak to have allowed it to happen. And that around Theresa what he felt was strong, probably in comparison, which was itself a weak way to look at it.
“People like Ellie Lester,” Theresa said, “they’re not whole.”
“What do you mean?” He didn’t really want to know—it might lead to another of Theresa’s tentative, tortuous discussions on spirituality—but the sunshine in his drink was pleasantly affecting him. His bones were starting to relax, his muscles to sway, the trees below to hum in a nondemanding harmonious background. He didn’t want to talk. Certainly not about the data he’d looked up on Ellie Lester when he got home, which included discovering that she would inherit control of her great-grandfather’s enormous fortune. Let Tessie babble instead. He would sit in the humming twilight and not listen.