astonished silence.
“They were utterly irresponsible,” she said severely. “With all their programs and policies and making everything better, they were fools. They let all kinds of things get loose and interbreed. Wiped out rice in one decade. The improved breech went sterile. The famines were terrible…Butterflies, we used to have butterflies, do you have them?”
“Some, still,” I said.
“And deletu?” A kind of singing firefly, now extinct, said my translatomat.
I shook my head wistfully.
She shook her head wistfully.
“I never saw a butterfly or a deletu. Only pictures…The insecticidal clones got them…But the scientists learned nothing—nothing! They set about improving the animals. Improving us! Dogs that could talk, cats that could play chess! Human beings who were going to be all geniuses and never get sick and live five hundred years! They did all that, oh yes, they did all that. There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. I can’t stand talking dogs. My big poodle Rover, he never says a word, the dear good soul. And then the humans! We’ll never, ever get rid of the Premier. He’s a Healthy, a bloody GAPA. He’s ninety now and looks thirty and he’ll go on looking thirty and being premier for four more centuries. He’s a pious hypocrite and a greedy, petty, stupid, mean-minded crook. Just the kind of man who ought to be siring children for five centuries…The Ban doesn’t apply to him…But still, I’m not saying the Ban was wrong. They had to do something. Things were really awful, fifty years ago. When they realised that genetic hackers had infiltrated all the laboratories, and half the techs were Bioist fanatics, and the Godsone Church had all those secret factories in the eastern hemisphere deliberately turning out genetic melds…Of course most of those products weren’t viable. But a lot of them were…The hackers were so good at it. The chicken people, you’ve seen them?”
As soon as she asked, I realised that I had: short, squat people who ran around in intersections squawking, so that all the traffic gridlocked in an effort not to run them over. “They just make me want to cry,” Ai Li A Le said, looking as if she wanted to cry.
“So the Ban forbade further experimentation?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. Actually, they blew up the laboratories. And sent the Bioists for reeducation in the Gubi. And jailed all the Godsone Fathers. And most of the Mothers too, I guess. And shot the geneticists. And destroyed all the experiments in progress. And the products, if they were”—she shrugged—“too far from the norm. The norm!” She scowled, though her sunny face was not made for scowling. “We don’t have a norm any more. We don’t have species any more. We’re a genetic porridge. When we plant maize, it comes up weevil-repellent clover that smells like chlorine. When we plant an oak, it comes up poison oak fifty feet high with a ten-foot-thick trunk. And when we make love we don’t know if we’re going to have a baby, or a foal, or a cygnet, or a sapling. My daughter—” and she paused. Her face worked and she had to compress her lips before she could go on. “My daughter lives in the North Sea. On raw fish. She’s very beautiful. Dark and silky and beautiful. But—I had to take her to the seacoast when she was two years old. I had to put her in that cold water, those big waves. I had to let her swim away, let her go be what she is. But she is human too! She is, she is human too!”
She was crying, and so was I.
After a while, Ai Li A Le went on to tell me how the Genome Collapse had led to profound economic depression, only worsened by the Purity Clauses of the Ban, which restricted jobs in the professions and government to those who tested 99.44% human—with exceptions for Healthies, Righteous Ones, and other GAPAs (Genetically Altered Products Approved by the Emergency Government). This was why she was working as a waitress. She was four percent maize.
“Maize was once the holy plant of many people, where I come from,” I said, hardly knowing what I said. “It is such a beautiful plant. I love everything made out of corn—polenta, hoecake, cornbread, tortillas, canned corn, creamed corn, hominy, grits, corn whiskey, corn chowder, on the cob, tamales—it’s all good. All good, all kind, all sacred. I hope you don’t mind if I talk about eating it!”
“Heavens no,” said Ai Li A Le, smiling. “What did you think cledif was made from?”
After a while I asked her about teddy bears. That phrase of course meant nothing to her, but when I described the creature in my bookcase she nodded—“Oh yes! Bookbears. Early on, when the genetic designers were making everything better, you know, they dwarfed bears way down for children’s pets. Like toys, stuffed animals, only they were alive. Programmed to be passive and affectionate. But some of the genes they used for dwarfing came from insects—springtails and earwigs. And the bears began to eat the children’s books. At night, while they were supposed to be cuddling in bed with the children, they’d go eat their books. They like paper and glue. And when they bred, the offspring had long tails, like wires, and a sort of insect jaw, so they weren’t much good for the children any more. But by then they’d escaped into the woodwork, between the walls…Some people call them bearwigs.”
I have been back to Islac several times to see Ai Li A Le. It is not a happy plane, or a reassuring one, but I would go to worse places than Islac to see so kind a smile, such a topknot of gold, and to drink maize with the woman who is maize.
MRS. TODD’S SHORTCUT
STEPHEN KING
Stephen King is the bestselling, award-winning author of innumerable classics, such as
“There goes the Todd woman,” I said.
Homer Buckland watched the little Jaguar go by and nodded. The woman raised her hand to Homer. Homer nodded his big, shaggy head to her but didn’t raise his own hand in return. The Todd family had a big summer home on Castle Lake, and Homer had been their caretaker since time out of mind. I had an idea that he disliked Worth Todd’s second wife every bit as much as he’d liked ’Phelia Todd, the first one.
This was just about two years ago and we were sitting on a bench in front of Bell’s Market, me with an orange soda-pop, Homer with a glass of mineral water. It was October, which is a peaceful time in Castle Rock. Lots of the lake places still get used on the weekends, but the aggressive, boozy summer socializing is over by then and the hunters with their big guns and their expensive nonresident permits pinned to their orange caps haven’t started to come into town yet. Crops have been mostly laid by. Nights are cool, good for sleeping, and old joints like mine haven’t yet started to complain. In October the sky over the lake is passing fair, with those big white clouds that move so slow; I like how they seem so flat on the bottoms, and how they are a little gray there, like with a shadow of sundown foretold, and I can watch the sun sparkle on the water and not be bored for some space of minutes. It’s in October, sitting on the bench in front of Bell’s and watching the lake from afar off, that I still wish I was a smoking man.
“She don’t drive as fast as ’Phelia,” Homer said. “I swan I used to think what an old-fashion name she had for a woman that could put a car through its paces like she could.”
Summer people like the Todds are nowhere near as interesting to the year-round residents of small Maine towns as they themselves believe. Year-round folk prefer their own love stories and hate stories and scandals and rumors of scandal. When that textile fellow from Amesbury shot himself, Estonia Corbridge found that after a week
