shouldn’t do things. Laws address whether we can do things, and with respect to cloning, clearly the answer is yes. The mapping of the human genome and the successful, even routine, cloning of man is one of the great accomplishments of our lifetimes, and if the United States Congress tells us, all evidence to the contrary, that we cannot clone stem cells in order to prolong life, cannot use cloning to treat infertility and stop the spread of hereditary disease, cannot seek out every resource and tool at our disposal to reduce the suffering of our patients, they are not creating a better America, they are increasing American misery.”
The applause was kick-started by a chorus of supporting cheers. One of the middle tables stood first, the diners kicking chairs back from the table and straightening their legs in the space between. In a moment, most of the gathered were standing and the applause grew in celebration of the consensus. Davis smiled and let the cheers subside until he could finally hear chair legs rubbing against the thin carpet as the guests returned to their seats.
Davis continued: “This is not meant to end the discussion about cloning. Walter and I debate this issue every time we get together. He suggests that just because we can clone human beings doesn’t mean we should. I tell him he’s answered the wrong question. If we can do something – to increase health, to increase happiness – doesn’t that mean we must?” Applause. “A couple comes into your office. They can’t have children, or they’re afraid to. They ask for your help and you have the ability to help them. How could it possibly be ethical to do otherwise?” Louder applause. “Walter says that what cloning professionals do is remarkable – and I agree, but not for the same reasons. He is amazed that we can take a cell, a fraction of a fingernail, and from that make a human being. I tell him nature has been doing that for years. Conception is still the bigger miracle to me. From two, one. It’s the lower organisms that usually reproduce asexually, after all.
“We do not ‘make people’ as Walter suggests. What we do is give them moms and dads. That truly is a remarkable thing.” Sustained and satisfied clapping.
“I agree with Walter on another matter, however. Our profession must have an ongoing and rigorous discussion concerning the ethics of all our practices. One of the reasons I support the efforts of this organization” – Davis gestured to the CALS banner behind him – “is that a free society must make difficult ethical decisions, must weigh the consequences of its actions, must debate and justify the validity of its works. To live under an oppressive government is to live without ethical dilemmas. In Castro’s Cuba, in Saddam’s Iraq, in the North Korea of Kim Jong Il, ordinary people did not debate whether they should do this or should not do that, only whether they could do this or could do that.
“Utilitarians ask us to consider the greatest good. That’s a valid philosophical approach, I suppose. The attorney general, along with the sponsors of Buckley-Rice, uses that rhetoric all the time. He claims the greatest good will be served by government regulation of scientific research, by the banning of all cloning procedures, by letting Congress set the agenda for scientific research in this country. But what about the greatest evil? The only thing the Luddites have against technology is their own fear of it. But if we stop, or even slow the pace of genetic research, thousands will die, tens of thousands will suffer, and billions – all the world’s free people, in fact – will find themselves worse off for it.”
Davis used eight true examples of current research to demonstrate his points, and he projected slides and videos on a giant screen behind him for illumination. He made sure to mention the work of a half-dozen people in attendance – Dr. Seebohm, Dr. Harmon, both Dr. Carters, Dr. Manet, Dr. Huang. CALS members grinned through it all, laughed three or four more times, and cheered him vigorously when he was through.
“Terrific!” Dr. Poonwalla said over his shoulder as guests lined up at the conclusion of the event to introduce themselves to Davis and express concurring opinions. “Just the thing to rally the troops!”
When the last well-wisher had made off for the coat check, Davis rode the elevator alongside a balding drunk wearing a name tag (not from the CALS conference, Davis ascertained). He leaned against the back wall of the cab and couldn’t even spit out the number of the floor he wanted. Annoyed, Davis got off on fourteen and when the drunk tried to follow, he pushed him back on and lit buttons for random floors with a slap of his hand.
Davis turned several corners, following arrows on painted wall plaques until he found his room number, then dropped his key card through the vertical slot and leaned on the door. The room was silent and he guessed without looking that she would be wound into the armchair by the floor lamp, reading one of the three paperbacks she had packed for the thirty-six-hour trip. It was dark except for a dim light in the foyer, however, and when he stepped gently into the room he saw she was asleep. He detoured into the oversized bathroom, where he peeled away his charcoal suit and brushed his teeth and ran a comb of wet fingers through his silver hair.
“How was it?” Joan asked, making a mockery of his exaggerated attempts at stealth. He continued them anyway, easing weightlessly into the bed next to her, pulling the sheet to his neck without billowing the cool air underneath.
“Just another day preaching to the converted,” he whispered.
“Mmm. That’s good. The converted don’t shoot at you, generally.” Joan made a reference to his old wound at least once a day, but she never mentioned Jackie’s death, according to the never-discussed rules of their partnership. They used to talk about Anna Kat all the time, but now her name was spoken less and less. Davis no longer felt he had to prove to Joan that he remembered his daughter.
Joan had left New Tech shortly after Davis, setting up her own practice at a clinic affiliated with Northwestern Hospital. As his legal troubles were confronted and dispatched, their relationship advanced as an inevitability, with each step toward intimacy seeming as preordained as a precocious child’s graduation from one grade to the next. When they were finally married, late last year, Joan worried her husband’s notoriety would scare away patients (or the parents of her patients, anyway) but she discovered, as he did, that people had long ago ceased to find the difference between fame and infamy interesting. There were a few extreme anti-cloners who no doubt imagined eternity in hell for any parent who put their child’s well-being in the hands of Davis Moore’s wife, but if anything, appointments increased when she changed her listing from Dr. Joan Burton to Dr. Joan Burton- Moore.
She reached across him with her right arm and placed her palm against the top of his stomach. With the nails of her left hand, she scratched him on the right temple. He smiled and rolled to his side, where she met his mouth with hers. She was naked, to his surprise – she always slept in a long T-shirt – and he kissed her with enthusiasm. His eyes adjusting to the light by the minute, he paused above her long enough to make her smile, and he delighted in his proximity to her, that she allowed him to touch her, to kiss her, to enter her. The marriage itself having been decided on as casually as a weekend at the lake house in Michigan, he still marveled that she returned his passion at night, she who was beautiful and smart and generous and ten years younger, when he was flawed and shamed and selfish and older and had failed badly at marriage once before.
She watched his eyes. There was a time, before they were together even, that she was certain she’d lost him. His preoccupation with AK’s killer had left him like a warehouse filled with empty boxes, with nothing inside yet no room for anything more. She had played along with his insanity in order to protect Justin, certainly, but also to protect Davis from his own madness, and also because she could think of no better way to be near him than to share the only thing that seemed to matter to him. Her love for him in those days was compartmentalized. She held little hope for it, and tried several times at relationships with more available men, but she always returned to the improbable dream that a life could be had with Davis Moore.
She was still young enough to have children – Davis himself had coaxed babies from countless women older than she – but Joan understood how unfair that would be. He was only now accepting that his daughter was gone. If she could have Davis – all of him – to herself, it would be enough, Joan thought.
Later, together, tangled, asleep, they each had horrible, sheet-twisting dreams in which the other was absent.
– 53 -
When Davis Moore shoved Mickey the Gerund back into the hotel elevator cab, it took just about all the willpower Mickey had not to laugh, or to grab Moore’s arm, or even to shout some epithet after him while remaining in drunken character. Instead, he stumbled silently back and watched the doors close and felt the elevator lurch upward. Mickey thought Moore was an affront to God, an obstacle to God’s will, and he had shot him once because of it. It was a source of some irritation to Mickey, all these years later, that he hadn’t killed Davis Moore. That he
