Frameshift (11 page)

It was a small, quiet wedding. Pierre had originally thought they’d get married at UCB’s chapel, but it turned out not to have any such thing — California political correctness. Instead, they ended up being married in the living room of Molly’s coworker, Professor Ingrid Lagerkvist, with the chaplain from Molly’s Unitarian fellowship conducting the service.

Ingrid, a thirty-four-year-old redhead with the palest blue eyes Pierre had ever seen, served as Molly’s matron of honor; Ingrid was normally quite slim, but was now five months pregnant. Pierre, who had been in California for less than a year now, enlisted Ingrid’s husband, Sven — a great bear of a man with long brown hair, a huge reddish brown beard, and Ben Franklin glasses — to be his best man. Also in attendance: Pierre’s mother, Elisabeth, who had flown down from Montreal; bubbly Joan Dawson and a dour Burian Klimus from the HGC office; and Pierre’s research assistant, Shari Cohen (whom Pierre could not help notice looked sad throughout the whole affair; it had perhaps been an error asking her to attend a wedding just three months after her own engagement had broken up). Absent were any members of Molly’s family; she hadn’t even told her mother she was getting married.

Molly and Pierre had argued a bit about what vows they should exchange. Pierre refused to have Molly pledge to keep the marriage “in sickness and in health,” reiterating that she should feel free to leave anytime if he should fall ill. And so:

“Do you, Pierre Jacques,” asked the white-haired Unitarian, wearing a secular three-piece suit with a red carnation in the lapel, “take Molly Louise to be your wife, to cherish and honor her, to love and protect her, to respect her and help her fulfill all her potential for so long as you carry each other in your hearts?”

“I do,” said Pierre, and then, smiling at his mother, he added, “
Oui
.”

“And do you, Molly Louise, take Pierre Jacques to be your husband, to cherish and honor him, to love and protect him, to respect him and help him fulfill all his potential for so long as you carry each other in your hearts?”

“I do,” she said, staring into Pierre’s eyes.

“By the authority vested in me by the state of California, I take great pride and pleasure in pronouncing you a married couple. Pierre and Molly, you may—”

But they already were. And a long, lingering kiss it was, too.

Their honeymoon — five days in British Columbia — had been wonderful.

But soon they were back at work, Pierre keeping his standard long hours at the lab. They’d let their separate apartments go, and had bought a six-room house on Spruce Street with white stucco walls, next to a bungalow done in pink stucco. The final vestiges of Pierre’s inheritance from Alain Tardivel’s life insurance covered the down payment. Pierre had taken a beating converting the money to U.S. dollars, but was delighted to discover mortgage interest was deductible here, something it hadn’t been back in Canada. Pierre enjoyed having a backyard, and plants grew spectacularly in this climate, although the giant snails gave him the willies.

Tonight, a warm evening in June, Pierre sat at the dining-room table, its top littered with little Chinese food containers. Tiffany Feng had long ago sent him a fully executed copy of his Gold Plan policy, but what with the marriage, moving into the house, and his work at the lab, he was only just getting around to looking it over. Molly, meanwhile, had had her fill of Chinese and was now sitting on a couch in the adjacent living room, browsing through
Newsweek
.

“Hey, listen to this!” said Pierre, speaking loudly enough to be heard in the next room. “Under ‘Standard Benefits,’ it says: ‘In cases in which amniocentesis, genetic counseling, or other prenatal testing provides indications that a child will require extensive neonatal or later-life medical treatment, Condor Insurance, Inc., will pay all costs required to terminate the pregnancy at a hospital or government-licensed abortion clinic.’ ”

Molly looked up. “It’s a fairly standard benefit; the university’s staff policy has that, too.”

“That doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“Why not?”

Pierre frowned. “It’s just that… I don’t know — it just seems a form of economically forced eugenics. If the baby isn’t perfect, you can have it aborted for free. But listen to this other clause — this is the one that really gets me: ‘Although our prenatal health benefits normally roll over into covering neonatal care, if amniocentesis, genetic counseling, or other prenatal testing provide indications that a child will be born manifesting symptoms of a genetic disorder, and the mother has not taken advantage of the benefit described under section twenty-two, paragraph six’ — that’s the free-abortion-of-defective-babies benefit — ‘neonatal health coverage will be withdrawn.’ You see what that means? If you
don’t
take the offer of a free abortion once it becomes clear that you’re going to have a less-than-perfect baby, and instead go ahead and give birth to the child, your insurance to cover the child’s needs is canceled. The insurance company is providing an enormous economic incentive to terminate all but perfect pregnancies.”

“I suppose,” said Molly slowly. She had gotten up and was now standing in the entrance to the dining room, leaning against the wall. “Still, didn’t I read about a case of the exact opposite? A couple, both of whom were genetically deaf, chose to abort their child because prenatal testing showed that it was
not
going to be deaf, and so they felt they wouldn’t be able to relate to it. This sort of thing goes both ways.”

“That case was different,” said Pierre. “I’m not sure I agree with the morality of it — aborting a normal child simply because he
was
normal — but at least it was the
parents
making the choice on their own, not being coerced by an outside agency. But this—” He shook his head.

“Decisions that should be private, family affairs — whether it’s to continue a pregnancy, or, as in my case, whether it’s to take a genetic test as an adult — are essentially being made for you by insurance companies. You have to terminate the pregnancy, or lose insurance; you have to take the test, or lose insurance.” He shook his head. “It stinks.”

He picked up the chop suey container, looked inside, but put it back down without taking any more. His appetite was gone.

It was Molly’s turn to make dinner. Pierre used to try to help her, but had soon learned it was actually easier for her if he just stayed out of the way. She was making spaghetti tonight — about ten minutes’ work when Pierre did it, since he relied on Ragu for the sauce and a Kraft shaker for the cheese. But for Molly it was a big production, making the sauce from scratch and grating up fresh Parmesan. Pierre sat in the living room, channel surfing. When Molly called out that dinner was ready, he headed into the dining nook. They had a butcher-block style table with green wicker chairs. Pierre pulled out his chair without looking and tried to sit down, but almost immediately he hopped back onto his feet.

There was a plush toy bee sitting on his chair, with giant Mickey Mouse eyes and a fuzzy yellow-and-black coat. Pierre picked it up. “What’s this?” he said.

Molly entered from the kitchen, bearing two plates of steaming spaghetti. She set them down before she spoke. “Well,” she said, nodding at the bee, “I think it’s time we had my flowers fertilized.”

Pierre raised his eyebrows. “You want to go ahead with the IVF?”

Molly nodded. “If it’s still okay with you.” She held up a hand. “I know it’s a lot of money, but, well — frankly, I’m scared by what happened to Ingrid.” Molly’s friend Ingrid Lagerkvist had given birth to a boy with Down’s syndrome; the odds of having a Down’s child go up with age.

“We’ll find the money,” said Pierre. “Don’t worry.” His face broke into a broad grin. “We’re going to have a baby!” He sprinkled cheese on his spaghetti, then did something Molly always found amusing: he cut his spaghetti into little bits. “A baby!” he said again.

Molly laughed. “
Oui, monsieur
.”

Pierre’s boss, Dr. Burian Klimus, looked up and nodded curtly at each of them in turn. “Tardivel. Molly.”

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, sir,” said Pierre, sitting down on the far side of the broad desk. “I know how busy you are.” Klimus was not one to waste energy acknowledging the obvious. He sat silently behind his cluttered desk, a slightly irritated expression on his broad, ancient face, waiting for Pierre to get to the point. “We need your advice. Molly and I, we’d like to have a child.”

“Flowers and a Chianti are an excellent starting point,” said Klimus in his dry voice, brown eyes unblinking.

Pierre laughed, more out of nervousness than because of the joke. He looked around the office. There was a second door, leading to some other room. Behind Klimus’s desk was a credenza with two globes on it. One was a globe of the Earth, with no political boundaries marked; the other was — Pierre guessed, based on its reddish color — a globe of Mars. There were framed astronomical photos on the walls. Pierre returned his gaze to Klimus. “We’ve decided we want to undergo in vitro fertilization, and, well, you wrote that big article about new reproductive technologies for

Science
with Professor Sousa, so…”

“Why IVF?” asked Klimus.

“I have blocked fallopian tubes,” said Molly.

Klimus nodded. “I see.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked as he did so, and interlaced his fingers behind his bald head. “Surely you understand the rudiments of the procedure: eggs would be removed from Molly and mixed with Pierre’s sperm in a petri dish. Once embryos are created, they’re implanted, and you hope for the best.”

“Actually,” said Pierre, “we weren’t planning to use my sperm.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “I, ah, I’m not in a position to be the biological father.”

“Are you impotent?”

Pierre was surprised by the question. “No.”

“Do you have a low sperm count? There are procedures—”

“I have no idea what my sperm count is. I assume it’s normal.”

“Then why? You have an adequate mind. Why not father a child?”

Pierre swallowed. “I, ah, carry some bad genes.”

Klimus nodded. “Voluntary eugenics. I approve.” He paused. “But, you know, once the embryo is eight cells in size, we can usually remove a single cell for PCR and then genetic testing, so—”

Pierre saw no reason to debate it with the old man. “We’re going to use donated sperm,” he said firmly.

Klimus shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

“But we’re looking for recommendations for a clinic. You visited a number of them while doing that article. Is there one you’d suggest?”

“There are several good ones here in the Bay Area,” said Klimus.

“Which would be the cheapest?” said Pierre. Klimus looked at him blankly. “We, ah, understand the procedure costs around ten thousand dollars.”

“
Per attempt,”
said Klimus. “And IVF has only a twenty percent success rate. The average cost of actually getting a baby through this method is forty thousand dollars.”

Pierre’s jaw dropped.
Forty
thousand? It was a huge amount of money, and their mortgage was a killer. He doubted they could manage that much.

But Molly pressed on. “Do the clinics choose the sperm donors?”

“Occasionally,” said Klimus. “More often, the woman chooses from a catalog listing the potential fathers’ physical, mental, and ethnic characteristics. And—” He stopped in mid-sentence, completely dead, as though his mind were a million miles away.

Pierre finally leaned a bit closer. “Yes?” he said.

“What about me?” asked Klimus.

“I beg your pardon?” said Pierre.

“Me. As donor.”

Molly’s jaw dropped a little. Klimus saw that and held up a hand, palm out. “We could do it here at LBL. I can do the fertilization work, and Gwendolyn Bacon — an IVF practitioner who owes me a favor — I’m sure I could get her to do the egg extraction and embryo implantation.”

“I don’t know,” said Pierre.

Klimus looked at him. “I propose a deal: use me as the donor, and I’ll pay the costs for the procedure, no matter how many attempts it takes.

I’ve invested my Nobel money well, and have some lucrative consulting contracts.”

“But…” began Molly. She trailed off, not knowing what to say. She wished there wasn’t the wide desk between them so she could read his mind, but all she could detect was a barrage of French from Pierre.

“I am old, I know,” said Klimus, without humor. “But that makes little difference to my sperm. I’m fully capable of serving as the biological father — and I’ll provide full documentation to show myself free of HIV.”

Pierre gulped air. “Won’t it be awkward, knowing the donor?”

“Oh, it’ll be our secret,” said Klimus, raising his hand again. “You want good DNA, no? I’m a Nobel Prize winner; I have an IQ of one-six-three.

I’m a proven commodity as far as longevity is concerned, and I have excellent eyesight and reflexes. Plus, I don’t carry genes for Alzheimer’s or diabetes or any other serious disorder.” He smiled slightly. “The worst thing programmed into my DNA is baldness, and I do confess I was hit with that at an early age.”

During Klimus’s long statement, Molly had started out by shaking her head slightly back and forth, back and forth, but that had stopped by the time he reached his conclusion. She looked now at Pierre, as if to gauge his reaction.

Klimus, too, turned his eyes on Pierre. “Come on, young man,” he said, and then his face split in a dry, cold grin. “Better the devil you know.”

“But why?” asked Pierre. “Why would you be interested?”

“I’m eighty-four,” said Klimus, “and have no children. I simply wish for the Klimus genes to not disappear from the gene pool.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You’re a young couple, just getting started. I know what you make, Tardivel, and can guess what you make, Molly. Tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of money to you.”

Pierre looked at Molly and shrugged. “I… I
suppose
it would be okay,” he said slowly, not at all sure of himself.

Klimus brought his hands together in a loud clap that sounded like a gunshot. “Wonderful!” he said. “Molly, we’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Bacon; she’ll prescribe hormone treatments to get you to develop multiple eggs.” Klimus rose to his feet, cutting off further discussion.

“Congratulations, Mother,” he said to Molly, and then, in an unexpected display of bonhomie, he came over and laid a bony arm on Pierre’s shoulder. “And congratulations to you, too, Father.”

“Big trouble,” said Shari, coming into Pierre’s lab and holding up a photocopy. “I found this note in a back issue of
Physical Review Letters
.”

She looked upset.

Pierre was spinning down his centrifuge. He left it whirling under inertia and looked up at her. “What’s it say?”

“Some researchers in Boston are contending that although the DNA that codes for protein synthesis is structured like a code — one word wrong and the message is garbled — the junk or intronic DNA is structured like a l
anguage
, with enough redundancy that small mistakes don’t matter.”

“Like a language?” said Pierre excitedly. “What do they mean?”

“In the active parts of the DNA, they found that the distribution of the various three-letter codons is random. But in the junk DNA, if you look at the distribution of ‘words’ of three, four, five, six, seven, and eight base pairs in length, you find that it’s just like what we have in a human language. If the most common word appears ten thousand times, then the tenth most common appears only one thousand times, and the hundredth most common appears just a hundred times — which is very much like the relative distribution of words in English. ’The‘ is an order of magnitude more common than ’his,‘ and ’his’ is an order of magnitude more common than, say, ‘go.’ Statistically, it’s a very distinctive pattern, diagnostic of a real language.”

“Excellent!” said Pierre. “Excellent.”

Vertical frown lines were marring Shari’s otherwise porcelain-smooth forehead. “It’s terrible. It means other people have been making good progress on this problem, too. That note in
Physical Review Letters
was published in the December fifth, 1994, issue.”

Pierre shrugged. “Remember Watson and Crick, hunting for the structure of DNA? You recall who else was working on the same problem?”

“Linus Pauling, among others.”

“Pauling, exactly — who’d already won a Nobel for his work on chemical bonding.” He looked at Shari. “But even old Linus couldn’t see the truth; he came up with a Rube Goldberg three-stranded model.” Pierre had learned all about Goldberg since coming to Berkeley; he was a UCB alumnus and an exhibition of his cartoons was on display on campus.

“Sure, some others have been working in the same area we’re pursuing.

But I’d rather you come in here and tell me that there’s good reason to think something meaningful is coded in the non-protein-synthesizing DNA than to say everyone who ever looked at it before has concluded it really is just junk. I know we’re on the right track, Shari. I know it.” He paused. “You’ve done good work. Go home; get a good night’s sleep.”

“You should go home, too,” Shari said.

Pierre smiled. “Actually, tonight the tables are turned. I’m waiting for Molly. She’s got a late departmental meeting. I’ll stay here till she calls.”

“All right. See you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Shari. And be careful — it’s pretty late already.”

Shari left the room and started walking down the corridor. She went outside and waited for the shuttle bus to arrive. It did so, and she rode it down to the campus proper. She wanted to run a few errands on campus before heading home, one of which took her near the psychology building, where Pierre’s wife was apparently still working. Just outside it, Shari was unnerved to collide with a rough-looking young man pacing impatiently back and forth as if he were waiting for someone. He was dressed in a leather jacket and faded jeans, and had closely cropped blond hair and a strange chin that looked like two protruding fists.

Nasty customer, Shari thought as she scurried away into the darkness…