Mendel's Dwarf (42 page)

There is a spasm of pain and guilt on the faces in the audience.

“Perhaps it will engulf us all eventually.”

Silence. The heartbeats gallop onward, careering toward delivery.

“You may plot the course of this explosion as a cosmologist might plot the evolution of a supernova: it began with prejudice and it blossomed with legislation.” There is a slide flung up on the screen, a list of salient events and dates. “It began in the early years of the century with the foundation of such organizations as the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany and the Eugenics Education Society in Britain. It reached an important marker in 1933 with the Eugenic Sterilization Law in Germany, and high tide in 1939, by which time almost four hundred thousand German men and women had undergone eugenic sterilization.”

The pain mounts, swelling inside her, racking that slender, white body as though determined to assert its mastery. She breathes in small gusts of trichloroethylene and the pain recedes. A nurse times the intervals between spasms as an interrogator might time the length of torture, turning subjective experience into a measured science, waiting for the confession, waiting for the moment when the body yields up only what is expected—the truth. “There’s a good girl,” she says comfortingly. “Won’t be long now, dear.”

Dilation of the cervix is complete by 9:15
A.M.
The coincidence is exact. I deliver my lecture; Jean delivers my child. Times are corrected for difference in time zone. I have thought of everything—at precisely 10:15 European Time I glance at my watch and move from the past to the present:

“The old eugenics died with the Third Reich, but make no mistake, the new eugenics is with us. It isn’t in the future, it is here and now. There are modern eugenicists here in this lecture theater at this very moment.” People shift uncomfortably in their chairs and glance around surreptitiously to see if they can spot one another. Is there some kind of password, a subtle sign of recognition? The chairman looks anxious. “Each year in the United States alone some thirty thousand babies are conceived by anonymous sperm donation. At the very least the donated sperm is certified to come from genetically healthy donors. At the worst it comes from William Shockley.”

And the nervous silence fractures into laughter. They laugh with relief, their mouths open like fish gasping for water; while I, poor dwarf, stand before them and wonder about my child. “Or if not from a Nobel Prize winner for physics, perhaps from the father of them all, Hermann Muller, the man who first conceived—if you will forgive the expression—of a sperm bank.” More laughter. Good old Ben.

“We all know Muller, don’t we? He’s one of ours: a geneticist, the man who demonstrated the link between ionizing radiation and mutation, the man who worked on the mutational effects of the Hiroshima bomb. Nobel Prize in 1946. Hermann Muller gave his sperm to the Repository for Germinal Choice on the condition that it must not be used for twenty-five years after his death. That brings it to maturity just about now.”

They laugh at my circus act, but what I tell them is only the truth.

“In the first edition of his book on eugenics, Muller, like the good old-fashioned socialist he was, favored the breeding of children who embodied the characteristics of Lenin and Marx. Things had changed by the second edition. By the second edition, Muller was back in the States after his sojourn in Russia. By the second edition, Lenin had been dropped in favor of Descartes; and Marx had lost out … to Lincoln.”

They are rolling in the aisles. Ben Lambert is a regular guy, they think. Tears are running down the chairman’s face.

“But it isn’t a joke.” They don’t want to believe me. There is nothing funnier than Nobel Prize winners making idiots of themselves. It is the most marvelous joke, surely. “Today respectable medical clinics are offering sperm sorting to enable parents to choose the sex of their children.”

The laughter stumbles, like a dwarf on a doorstep. Surely Ben the clown, Ben the circus act, Ben the regular guy who is so brave and so goddamn
funny
, is not going to fall down on this one …

“The clinics call this service ‘family balancing.’ A recent opinion poll in the States suggested that, if given the choice, sixty-seven percent of couples would choose to have a male child. One wonders where the balance is in that.” The remaining laughter is a paltry, anxious thing. The clown has fallen, and it isn’t for laughs. He’s not waving his arms around like a fool while the hanging gardens roar and sway with mirth. This is no pratfall.

“Then there is the other matter, the question of genetic disorder. Forget gene therapy. Gene therapy is way in the future. I talk of today. Today the same clinics offer screening for genetic disease and genetic diagnosis of pre-implantation embryos. Who can blame them? The demand is there, isn’t it? Which of you would want a child with anencephaly, or Tay-Sachs disease, or”—the art of the well-tempered pause, timed to the nearest nanosecond—“achondroplasia?”

Silence. I can play them as one would play a fish, a foolish flapping trout, gasping and thrashing and not knowing which way to turn.

“Now you can choose your embryos and implant only the healthy ones and thus avoid the unpleasantness and waste of having to abort fetuses that you don’t want. Thus you improve the genetic stock without even mentioning the idea …”

In the delivery room, Jean lies with her legs up in some kind of harness. Her vulva gapes, a maw of coral red, rimmed with matted hair—a dwarf’s cave from which a dwarf is struggling to emerge. Oxytocin, a nine-amino-acid polypeptide coded for by a gene on chromosome 20, lashes at the muscles of her uterus. The acolytes of obstetrics crowd around. Gowned and masked, Hugo Miller hides in the background and barely watches. Jean breathes deeply and the nurse beside her whispers encouragement and a brown and wrinkled thing presses at the entrance of the cave …

“That is today. Today you can already screen for a thousand or so disorders. But what of the future?” What indeed? Of course they already know about the future, most of them. The future is there in the test tubes back in the lab, in the gels and the genomic libraries. The future is a strange beast in the final throes of birth. “In the future—the near future—you will be able to choose other qualities in the embryo: the child’s eye color, hair color, skin color, and height. Height is one of the most significant, because of all our prejudices it is the most ingrained and the most insidious. We
love
height.” I stand there before them, deformed and diminished. They writhe in their seats, as though I have them skewered.

“Hitler,” I tell them in case they hadn’t already guessed, “Hitler would have loved it …”

“There we go.” The head emerges, flips over the threshold of the cave, discovers features—a brow, eyes clenched tight, a nose. Fluid flows from the old, wrinkled mouth. The face turns toward its right, almost conversationally, as though it has been called to look at something, the mole on the inside of her right thigh, perhaps.
A thin cry escapes into the oppressive air of the delivery room. “Luverly,” a voice says. Hugo Miller faints.

“At least the old eugenics was governed by some kind of theory, however dreadful it may have been. The new eugenics,
our
eugenics, is governed only by the laws of the marketplace. You get what you can pay for.”

In the lecture theater there is only silence—the silence of complicity.

“Are we really such intellectual dwarfs”—ah, they shiver at that one—“as to imagine that the laws of supply and demand can be elevated to the level of a philosophy? Because that is what we have done. We have within our grasp the future of mankind, and as things are going the future will be chosen according to the same criteria as people now choose silicone breast implants and liposuction and hair transplants. It will be eugenics by consumer choice, the eugenics of the marketplace. All masquerading as freedom.”

The baby shoulders its way out, the obstetrician’s cupped hands supporting it, feeling around its neck for the umbilical cord. “There we are, dear. Bear down, bear down. There we are …” There is a momentary air of relief in the delivery room, a fleeting sensation of triumph. Then a sudden disturbance—“Oxygen,” a voice calls. “Oxygen!”

These things happen simultaneously: the baby is lifted up with its umbilical cord hanging from it like a gray gut; an oxygen mask is clamped onto Jean’s face; Hugo Miller is hurried out of the room. The baby is a boy, but no one remarks on the fact.