Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (15 page)

Sell it, shut it, or clean it up! I slam the phone down in Tom’s ear. I’m not about to let him keep raping me.

He asks for another meeting and I make another trip down to the city. “I understand you’re buying up everything else along the canal,” he starts in. “Why don’t you buy the plant from me—from
us.
I mean you are the owner as much as I am, Eleanor. You’ve got the money. But do you really want to buy it from yourself, from O’Kell Consolidated?” How much? I say. He names his price,
our
price. Out of the question, I say. “Well, then,” Tom says. “I suppose you can take it up with the board. You are still on the board, aren’t you?” Fuck you, I say.

Bifocals again. “I have a message for you from Mr. O’Kell,” she says. “He says if you don’t end your protest within ten days he will tell the press that you are an owner of the plant.” Ask me if I care, I tell her.

“I’m afraid I can’t sell you the plant, Eleanor,” Tom tells me over the phone. What are you talking about? I say. “The nuclear energy business?” he says. “It’s past peak, past prime. The risks now far outweigh the advantages. The protests are depressing our net worth, and all the doomsday talk is going to be a drag on our earnings forever. It all became
so
tiresome, just like Father’s tiresome electrical patents. The time has come to cash out, to play some other game. You and that splinter group of yours actually helped us see the light. You have my thanks. You have, as always, served a very useful purpose.” What are you saying? “O’Kell Consolidated is no longer the owner of
any
nuclear power plants, Eleanor. We are no longer in the nuclear energy business. Instead we are flush with cash.” Then where are you going to put our money?  “If I knew that,” Tom says, “you and I would be even richer than we are today.”

I had forgotten how good it can feel to hate. I had forgotten just how much I hate
him
.

Good news, finally. The new owners of the plant are going to clean up their act in the Hat City. They are not going to close it down entirely, but they are going to immediately stop dumping their waste untreated into the canal. I call a meeting in the basement of the Cathedral to tell The Tommies to enjoy our first great victory together. But inside I feel raped by my bastard brother all over again.

There has been enough inbreeding in the last town along the canal to last a century. What we need now is plain old
breeding
, intentional manipulation to produce the desired result. I want to pick and choose whatever traits I want for my Tomgirls, from brown hair to perfect breasts to a baby’s sex. They say it’s years away but I don’t believe it. Money has a way of making things come to life overnight. But how? It’s too late for arranged marriages, too soon for test-tube babies. Where do we go from here?

“We can adopt!” Scarlett says. “Why not?” I say it’s only a matter of time before society accepts that two mothers are better for a family than a father fighting or in flight. But you can’t expect a judge to see it that way. The only place men are
really
needed, I tell Scarlett, is in a courtroom. And a court case means more exposure than we want. The world beyond the canal is
not
ready for The Tommies. And we’re a long way from being ready for the world.

I promise myself we are going to find a better way, a better life for our baby girls, with or without their mothers. We are going to make damn sure our movement survives no matter what. By the time our girls are grown, by the time they have baby girls of their own, there
will
be a better way, even if I have to spend my every last dime to find it. I think of it as natural selection, with me, naturally, doing the selecting.

There is talk in
Life
now of test-tube babies, of creating life outside the womb. In a world where life is man-made, where a man’s sperm carries more weight than the man, any kind of life is possible for a price. But right now it all seems too far-fetched, too much like science fiction, like a town full of bald-headed aliens. I wish I knew what to do next. I wish I knew what to do
period
.

I resign from the board of O’Kell Consolidated. My letter to Tom says he should be crucified.

I feel so much anger at Tom, so much anguish about The Tommies.

I have to try something radical, something radically different, so that the future has nothing to do with the past. I need to find a madwoman. There’s no other way to put it. But it’s not like I can put an ad in
The Times
.

It’s time I did my homework. There are geneticists all over the country in various forms of research, but I need a woman with no politics and no mind for it and a blind ambition for her work, someone wronged by men, someone angry enough at men to learn how to hate them.

Most of the geneticists I hear about are men, and most of them are fat and happy in their tenured ivory towers. I talk to a few, two in Chicago, one at Stanford, two at Berkeley. They’re all willing to take my money as consultants. But men are a dead end, a complete waste of my time.

A molecular biologist at Cold Spring Harbor, a woman, tells me that there are big problems at Harvard, because the Mayor of Cambridge wants to stop all biological testing. She tells me that whole departments might have to close up shop. She tells me about a woman named Abigail Rickover.

I get on the phone with everyone I know in medicine and her name keeps cropping up. She’s ahead of everyone else in the field, my sources tell me. She thinks it’s possible to do what I want to do, to create the right kind of creatures on demand.

All roads lead to Abigail Rickover, an apolitical orphan in the world of genetic politics. All she cares about is her work, bless her. I am going to wine her and dine her.

We will build statues for you in this town, I am saying to Abigail Rickover. You will be famous. You will be a hero. I am thinking so what if she looks like something out of a test tube, with features so plain you could use them to set the mean on the human race. I know enough to know that she is a geneticist so brilliant the world will beat her to a bloody pulp. To me, that makes her just like a Tommie, the endpoint of evolution, the equivalent of a new beginning. I say I want her to be the first executive director of The Briody Institute for Advanced Family Research. She looks out the window to the streets that lead down to the canal. “It’s not Cambridge,” Abigail Rickover says. “It’s not Harvard.” No it’s not, I say. But Cambridge and Harvard are
never
going to let you do what you want to do. The Mayor there wants to shut you down, and the male professors with tenure are not about to give you your due. Here you can build your own empire. You can create your own world, a better world. I will give you the keys to the kingdom. That’s a promise. “Do you understand what I’m trying to do?” Abigail Rickover says. Yes and no, I say. “I am trying to find a way to put genes into the body. It’s our best hope to cure illness, birth defects, cancer, multiple sclerosis, all kinds of disease.” It sounds like a miracle cure, I say. “If it works,” Abigail Rickover says, “it will be no miracle.”

“I don’t know,” Abigail Rickover says over the phone. I am propped up in bed with my Princess, and I am not about to let her say no. You can bring in anyone you want, I tell her. You can have all the resources you need. Don’t forget that I’m an O’Kell, for God’s sake. As far as I’m concerned, you have an open checkbook. Just name your price. She does and it’s not even half
what I’m willing to spend for her. “I don’t want a statue,” she says. “I just want a lab and no distractions.” Piece of cake, I say.

I tell The Tommies to come together in the basement of the Cathedral so that I can introduce Abigail Rickover. “I am a scientist,” she says. “That means I study things in pursuit of pure knowledge. What becomes of that knowledge is another matter entirely.” I ask her to tell The Tommies what the new world might look like. “By using what we call gene therapy, by inserting the right genes right into people, we are going to be able to find a cure for cancer and just about everything else under the sun. It’s still years away, but it’s not centuries away. It’s not as far away as everybody thinks.” We all applaud. I listen to her speech but I won’t get up to give my own. I don’t want anyone to know just yet that in our tribe of Tommies, only the Amazonian Tomgirls will be allowed to conceive. We will mix and match the physical beauty of Thomas Cushing’s heirs with the finest genes on the planet. And I will be the legal guardian of every one of them. For me, once a childless nun, a granddaughter of Thomas Cushing, this is the closest I will ever get to immortality.

I make sure Abigail Rickover explains everything to me. I don’t understand the half of it, not yet. I don’t know anything about “gene-splicing” or what-have-you. But I am going to learn. I have given her the keys to the kingdom but I am still king
and
queen.

“So what’s it for?” Scarlett wants to know. Sorry? I say. “You know,” she says. “All this ‘Brave New World’ stuff. What’s it all about?” If you want a new world, I tell her, you have to be very brave.

“Here is the building I will need,” Abigail Rickover says. “Here are the people I will need. Here is what it will cost.” She stares at me, waiting for me to faint. What are we waiting for? I say. Let’s light this candle.

“Everything’s spic-and-span, Mrs. O’K,” Sliv says. “You would hardly know the place.” I know, I tell him. It’s a miracle. Sliv is making the town
shine for the first time since barges made the trip up canal. There’s no trash to be found anywhere, and beware The Tommie who leaves a wrapper on the sidewalk. Thanks to Sliv, the last town along the canal is starting to look like the kind of town where I would want my Tommie girls to grow up.

I approve the plans for the new Briody Institute for Advanced Family Research, a building that will go up right by the canal, facing west. Who says money can’t buy you love?

Whenever I feel black I walk right over to the nursery to watch our Tomgirls grow up. They are all nearly three now. Where has the time gone? They have the ruddiness of the Cushings, every one of them, the long legs and longing eyes and the reddish tinge to their cheeks and hair. They stand ready to run at all times, and if we don’t get them outside, even on bad days, you can hear them chattering in the bunkhouse long into the night. They know all the stories of Kate Briody and Tommie glory by heart. There is no television in their lives, and we are careful of what they listen to on the radio, of what they hear from their Tommie teachers, of everything that goes into their beautiful hearts and minds and heads. If all goes well, they will
never
hear a discouraging word about women, and they will never know the things the world won’t let them do. They can grow up to be the master race. My plan is to impregnate them as early as possible, before they can learn too much about boys.

One day I would like to write something for the Tomgirls that I could call “The Book of O’Kells.” Every religion needs a Bible.

In the new Briody Center, The Tommies can show my Tomgirls how to live, and why they are being raised by women to create nothing but women. There is no shortage of stepmothers in the last town along the canal, no shortage of mother love.

We start every morning with my Tomgirls. We tell them Tomgirls are strong, that Tomgirls can accomplish anything they want in life, that their first duty
is to create a new race. You have been chosen, we tell each one. You have been chosen because you are so remarkable, so beautiful, so smart, so strong. Nothing can stop you.