“That’s my sweet boy,” she murmured, hugging him and putting him down once more, handing him the child-sized paint sticks she’d gone to such trouble to find.
“Dananana,” he said, patting her face with one hand as he threw the sticks across the room with the other. “Dananana.”
“How old is he?” Trompe asked from the doorway. His face showed nothing, but he knew the answer. He was only checking.
She stiffened. “Almost six.” Leely was just past his fifth birthday.
“Big for his age.” Trompe’s voice held no emotion, but she could feel something. Disapproval? Or what? “He must weigh what?”
“He’s heavy for his age. But, as you know, Leelson is tall and muscular, and my family also runs to size, so Leely will probably be a big man.”
Now she knew what he was thinking. How will she cope then? When he’s a big man, what will she do? His mouth opened, then closed again, the words unspoken. Well, at least he learned fast. And what right did he have to disapprove?
“What kind of treatments have you tried?” he asked.
She fought down her annoyance. Even though he’d been briefed, he wanted her to talk about it so he could feel what she felt, find his way into her psyche. Damn all Fastigats! Would he be more help if he understood?
She gritted her teeth and said in a patient voice, “I’m sure you were told, but both Leelson and I had a genome check early in my pregnancy. Both of us are within normal limits. Leely’s pattern differs from ours only within normal limits. Physically, he’s fine.”
“And mentally?”
Had the man no eyes? She kept her voice calm as she answered.
“Well, sometimes he won’t leave his clothes on. He won’t learn to use the potty, though he does like to eliminate outdoors. He has no speech, obviously. And he doesn’t seem to classify. He reacts to each new animal, person, or thing in pretty much the same manner, with curiosity. If one food chip is tasty, he doesn’t assume similar-looking ones are. He regards each thing as unique.”
“Really?”
“Give him a red ball, he’ll learn that it bounces and squeezes. He may treasure it. If he loses it and I give him another red ball, he has to start from scratch. Though it looks identical to me, somehow he knows it isn’t the same thing he had before.”
“Strange.”
She nodded. It was. Strange.
“I understand they’ve tried splicing him.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyhow. “The geneticists spotted a few rare variations that they thought might be connected to behavior, and they tried substituting some more common alleles. Among Leely’s unique attributes, however, is a super-efficient immune system. Each time extraneous genetic material is introduced, his body kills it. It may take him a day, or a week, but he manages it every time. That means that even if we hit upon whatever variant might help, it would take him a very short time to get rid of it. And, of course, it may not be in the chromosomes. It may be elsewhere in the cells.”
The geneticists had suggested a complete cellular inventory, but she had resisted that. Perhaps she didn’t really want to know. If they found something …Well, how very final that would be!
Trompe said, “I imagine the doctors are very interested in him! The immune system, I mean.”
“Extremely interested. Particularly inasmuch as he also heals very quickly. At first thought, these traits would seem to be extremely valuable—”
“But only the healing, the immunity.”
“Right. If they could be separated from the rest of his pattern, but no one knows what particular combination of combinations has resulted in that trait.”
“So, whatever’s wrong, it can’t be fixed.”
She stiffened. “I object to the word. Leely is all right the way he is! You may as well know that Leelson Famber and I disagreed on that point.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “But…how intelligent is he?”
“I believe he has a different level of intelligence,” she said belligerently. One of her most vehement arguments with Leelson had been on that subject. She tried to be fair. “Though it’s hard to be sure because our idea of intelligence is so dependent upon the use of language. He scores quite high on some nonverbal tests, those that don’t depend solely on classification.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What I said earlier! He doesn’t classify things. He can’t look at a pile of blocks and pick out all the blue ones. Mere blueness isn’t a category for Leely. Nor mere roundness, mere squareness, mere… whatever. Each thing is its own thing.”
“With its own name?”
“Who knows? If he could talk, perhaps that would be true. He’s past the age when most children either learn a language or create one.” She heard the pain in her voice, knew Trompe heard it too.
“So?” He was looking at her curiously, figuring her out.
Lutha took firm control of her voice. She had to sound objective and calm. She would not start out on this arduous project with a companion who felt she was irrational.
“Since he’s so very healthy, I’ve considered he might be a new and fortunate mutation. Perhaps he will learn language later than most children.”
There was no legitimate reason for her to believe that, but she believed it anyhow, passionately, with her whole heart. Leelson had said that for every positive mutation, there were undoubtedly thousands of useless or lethal ones. Intellectually, she accepted that. So far as Leely was concerned, she could not. He couldn’t be … useless.
She pulled her mind away from that thought. She didn’t want Trompe Paggas to think she was—what? Deluded. A mother who was blind and fond to the point
