Women in Deep Time Read Free Page B

older. And I am something of a judge. As for the way the others feel about you…I was a freak once.”
    Letitia looked up at him.
    “Certainly. Bona fide. Much more of a freak than you. There are ten NGs like yourself in this school now. When I was your age, I was the only PPC in my school. There was still suspicion and even riots. Some PPCs were killed in one school when parents stormed the grounds.”
    Letitia stared.
    “The other kids hated me. I wasn’t bad-looking, but they knew. They had parents who told them PPCs were Frankenstein monsters. Do you remember the Rifkin Society? They’re still around, but they’re extreme fringies now. Just as well. They thought I’d been grown in a test tube somewhere and hatched out of an incubator. You’ve never experienced real hatred, I suspect. I did.”
    “You were nice-looking,” Letitia said. “You knew somebody would like you eventually, maybe even love you. But what about me? Because of what I am, the way Ilook, who will ever want me? And will a PPC ever want to be with a Dingy?”
    She knew these were hard questions and Rutger made no pretense of answering them. “Say it all works out for the worst,” he said. “You end up a spinster and no one ever loves you. you spend the rest of your days alone. Is that what you’re worried about?”
    Her eyes widened. She had never quite thought those things through. Now she really hurt.
    “Everybody out there is choosing beauty for their kids. They’re choosing slender, athletic bodies and fine minds. You have a fine mind, but you don’t have an athletic body. Or so you seem to be convinced; I have no record of you ever trying out for athletics. So when you’re out in the adult world, sure, you’ll look different. But why can’t that be an advantage? You may be surprised how hard we PPCs try to be different. And how hard it is, since tastes vary so little in our parents. You have that built in.”
    Letitia listened, but the layers of paving were closing again. “Icing on the cake,” she said.
    Rutger regarded her with his shrewd blue eyes and shrugged. “Come back in a month and talk to me,” he said. “Until then, I think autocounselors will do fine.”
    Little was said at dinner and less after. She went upstairs and to bed at an early hour, feeling logy and hoping for escape.
    Her father did his usual bedcheck an hour after she had put on her pajamas and lain down. “Rolled tight?” he asked.
    “Mmph,” she replied.
    “Sleep tighter,” he said. Rituals and formulas. Her life had been shaped by parents who were comfortable with nightly rituals and formulas.
    Almost immediately after sleep, or so it seemed, she cameabruptly awake. She sat up in bed and realized where she was, and who, and began to cry. She had had the strangest and most beautiful dream, the finest ever without a dream mod. She could not remember details now, try as she might, but waking was almost more than she could bear.
     
    In first period, Georgia Fischer blitzed yet again and had to go to the infirmary. Letitia watched the others and saw a stony general cover-up of feelings. Edna Corman excused herself in second period and came back with red puffy eyes and pink cheeks. The tension built through the rest of the day until she wondered how anyone could concentrate. She did her own studying without any conviction; she was still wrapped in the dream, trying to decide what it meant.
    In eighth period, she once again sat behind John Lockwood. It was as if she had completed a cycle beginning in the morning and ending with her last class. She looked at her watch anxiously. Once again, they had Mr. Brant supervising. He seemed distracted, as if he, too, had had a dream, and it hadn’t been as pleasant as hers.
    Brant had them cut mods mid-period and begin a discussion on what had been learned. These were the so-called integrative moments when the media learning was fixed by social interaction; Letitia found these periods a trial at the best of