“Royalties on. Don’t know what to do with it, the stuff just piles up in the bank. I’d have gotten you a Lamborghini, but—”

  “Yeah.” I started it up, revved the engine once or twice, switched it off again and got out. I rubbed my hand over the roof. “Let’s get something to eat before the greedy bastards have scarfed it all down.” Hearing his name, Scarf the dog barked happily behind the gate. We went in and mingled. What a grrl!

  Before midnight, a handful of neighbors cleaned up, helped by the few Atom Kids who’d made it to the event. Ruthie’s parents had already walked her home. The sound system was softened to bluesy jazz after everyone else had been politely, good-humoredly but firmly shown the door. “Another school day tomorrow,” my father had said. That was all the explanation needed in this neighborhood.

  I loaded washables into the dishwasher, rinsed and stacked the recycle candidates, gobbled down the last of the pistachio ice-cream, felt mildly sick as a result and finally, sighing, when Father Paul caught my eye, followed him into Dad’s study. Janey had hinted at some Rite of Passage (she’d turned 16 three months earlier) but refused by a dozen amusing diversions and one snappish outburst to tell me what to expect.

  Mom and Dad followed us in. Marius watched keenly from the hall; nothing got past that guy. I heard the door click shut, and lock.

  Relaxed in Dad’s leather and tubular steel reading chair, an elderly gentleman in his mid-seventies was already in situ, wearing a suit and Harvard club tie, of all things.

  Omg. The Patriarch. I was shaken, bewildered, gratified. I’d met him only once before, for a long discussion after my declaration of fervent disbelief in deity. After all, he was the powerful personality who’d persuaded L.C. to read Thomas Aquinas shortly after he saved her from a childhood of quiet desperation that made my daily troubles seem like a night at the opera.

  “Hello, sir,” I said, and held out my hand. I realized a moment later I’d said it in Tibetan and, shaking my head, repeated my greeting in English. Trust me, I urged with my modest demeanor, I’m house-broken. I don’t really slay repugnant oafs on the school bus with a sharpened pencil to the brain. I don’t even really want to. No, really.

  His happy laughter rumbled. He rose, with a little difficulty, and in a gesture almost exactly like Father Paul’s earlier in the evening, opened his arms. “Come on, you scamp. Give me a hug, and tell me how you justify your godless existence.”

  My eyes filled with tears. Who’d have thunk? But this man had brought my parents together, as children, in the dark days when—according to everything I’d read on the period—the heaving ‘60s were expiring into the early ‘70s in confused, sexually reckless utopian optimism, women and gays finding their voices finally, amid the last gasps of a brutal, seemingly unending war in Asia. A pointless war, part of my mind annotated automatically to itself, that ended in baffled defeat after twelve bloody years—and now, all these decades later, we were embroiled again in another apparently pointless war, had been for five years.

  Was that the unavoidable outcome of a numbed, dumbed-down population with an average IQ only a bit above 100? Citizens who elected as their representatives men and a few women smarter than themselves, yes, by and large, yet lacking real perspective, most of them? Missing the aptitude to cast themselves forward in well-grounded imagination, to test out their proposed actions before barging into costly ruin? Was what I saw and heard everywhere, every day, just concerted stupidity run riot in a polity vastly larger than the cozy hunter-gatherer aggregations humans were evolved to deal with? It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

  There was more than a whiff of self-preening in that thumb-nail analysis, and I knew it. Yet equally self-interested, concealed agendas held sway, I was sure, among the owners, the judges, the clergy, the warrior chiefs of labor and military, the imprisoned, the drugged and the dealers in sedation. Yes, all that, no doubt—but still, what sort of person deliberately sets out to derange the larger part of the planet into violent hatred and opposition? Al Quaeda and Hamas were not the only crazies at that game. Was this widespread barbarity, too, a consequence, a manifestation, of the Hard Problem? Simply an inability to sense that other humans have interests and profoundly private feelings of their own, and potent beliefs, however delusional most of them had to be (since almost all were at odds with the rest)—an incapacity for that sympathetic resonance which somehow emulates the qualia of the deepest inward lives of their foes?

  These fairly commonplace reflections, as I say, dashed like foxes pursued by hounds in my own inwardness, as I stepped into Dr. Herbert’s embrace and felt flooding through me his kindness, generosity, concern for us all—and his ordinariness. His mental limitations, measured against two generations of his appalling charges.

  And a part of me recoiled. I didn’t want to know what it was like to be the Patriarch. He had made it possible for us to find a place in the world, had guarded us when we were most vulnerable, had filled the troubled and often squalid lives of the young Atom Kids with warmth and encouragement, had stood against their public enemies. And yet . . . His mind was small, narrow, constricted by the limitations imposed by his brain’s natural genetic program. And I could not bear to imagine such restriction, the stifled qualia of such imprisonment. A pulse of horror passed through me.

  And he felt it. His clasp failed, for a moment. He did not draw away, but I knew that a deep, abiding sadness must have bruised his heart at that moment. For, after all, this could not have been the first time he’d know such instinctive rejection. It was the cost and misery of his vocation as our mentor and protector.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He placed his hands on my shoulders. “That’s all right, lad. It’s your fate, this loneliness, this aloneness. I wish I could bridge it, Saul, but the barrier is too high. Still, we can be friends, I hope?”

  I recalled, with bitter sharpness, something Father Paul had let slip once. Yes, we could be friends—as I might offer friendship to my dear pal Scarf, and he, in his loyal, hungry, restless, scurrying way, might offer his in return. It was a sickening realization. I tasted the bile in my throat, and then Dad was holding my arm, steadying my shaky legs. Unseasonable spring warmth had left the air. My ears rang. Mom brought me a chair, touched the back of my head lightly, and I let myself down. Dr. Herbert remained on his feet, alone. It seemed to me his features were carved in saddened resignation, an acknowledgement of loss beyond loss greater, perhaps, than any man had ever been obliged to bear.

  “Sure,” I said. There was a tremor in my voice. “Sure. I’m proud to be your friend, sir.”

  After a long moment, my father cleared his throat, and both my parents, by turns, with a word here and there from the Patriarch, started to explain things to me.

  We second-gen kids already knew the atomic radiation legend was bogus, not to mention ludicrous, despite the X-Men franchise that seemed to capitalize, distantly, on our leaked cover story. How could a blizzard of alpha particles and neutrons sleeting at random through the bodies of unprotected researchers all create precisely the same mutation in their offspring? Chemical mutagens, yes—radiation, not a chance. Getting a major REM load is like being sprayed with machine-gun bullets, not tweaked by exquisitely targeted tweezers. That required deliberate insertion of modified genes, which, they told me, is what had been done back there in the Above Top Secret Los Alamos Biowarfare Unit to our pregnant grandmothers, using fragile and primitive techniques noelse would replicate (or at least publish) for years.

  I thought this was ridiculous, about as likely as hearing that we’d been created as hybrid UFO aliens. The genome project was still limping—well, galloping—toward closure half a century after this miracle of gynecology was supposedly wrought. L.C. flicked on the computer and called up a brisk briefing for me. Holy cow. I read it over her shoulder, flicking down pages with voice command.

  The first “test tube baby” IVF was announced to the press in 1978, twenty years after the Atom Kids were conceived. And there was nothing modified about little Louise Brown, of Greater Manchester, England, except for her very existence. (The poor Indian guy who produced the second IVF child known to history was hounded by his purblind and moralizing marxist Bengali government, and killed himself several years later. Another class of motive for keeping all this hushed up, maybe. Humans do seem to love rushing about with pitchforks and blazing brands. “Burn the witch!”)

  But, obviously, classified work had been going on much earlier than that.

  “Shortly after the end of the Second World war,” Mom told me, even as I speed-read the details, “Dr. Min Chueh Chang moved from China to Massachusetts and started working seriously on fertilization.”

  “The contraceptive pill,” I muttered.

  “Ironic, yes. But he and his colleagues found ways to create life as well as suppress it.” I expected a mini-lecture on the wickedness of unnatural tampering with God’s plan for human life, but I guess she knew I had it memorized. The images jumped on the screen. Cold shock technique. Sperm capacitation. Genetic recombination. The door was opening for—

  Wait a moment. It had already been opened as far back as . . . 1935! Chang’s colleague, Gregory Pincus, had fertilized rabbit ova in vitro, but few believed him. His work wasn’t recognized until around the time the first “Atom Kids” were born. Interesting timing! Clearly some observers had been paying attention.

  “Meanwhile,” Mom was saying, “from the moment Crick and Watson clarified DNA’s helical structure, and then cracked the code, a black team at Los Alamos was building on Chang’s work.”

  “Plasmids,” said Father Paul. I turned; he’d come quietly into the study and relocked the door behind him. The adults regarded me with a sober solemnity I rarely saw in them. “Josh Lederberg was already doing good work in the late ‘40s on bacterial conjugation. He and wife Esther shared a Pasteur Medal in 1956. Outstanding work in microbiology and genetics.”

  And on my parents? Maybe not—but someone else had followed swiftly in the Lederbergs’ tracks.

  “Plasmids,” I repeated. Biology was Ruthie’s stomping ground, not mine. “Little rings of DNA or something, right?” You could insert them into cells, and they’d start pumping out their own specialized proteins—or sneak into the nuclear DNA, where with luck they’d take up residence.

  “Hence bacterial conjugation. Syzygy,” said the Patriarch, and he broke into a smile. “That’s what we called it back then. No sex, but as good as.” He shot Paul an amused glance, and got a faint frown in reply.

  “I thought that had something to do with the moon. Syzygy, not sex.”

  “Well, Saul, yes, it does, but that’s a different sense of the word. This isn’t astronomy, I assure you—nor astrology, neither. It was dirty, but it worked—some of the time.” Paul looked grim. “It also killed seven women, and dozens of babies. They had no right . . . ” He broke off. “Well, different times. Nuclear weapons were the doomsday disaster poised to obliterate all life. You’d probably heard about the CIA medical experiments on black prisoners?”

  I nodded. No words necessary. The screen flickered under Mom’s finger clicks with officially-mandated horror. Two hundred women infected with viral hepatitis in 1950, so the military might learn what would result if evil communists turned to germ warfare. Fifteen years later, just to be sure, another doctor repeated it with retarded children living in Staten Island. Live cancer cells shot into prisoners at Ohio State Prison by Sloan Kettering researchers in 1952. From the early ‘50s to the late ‘60s, Project MKULTRA craziness using lysergic acid and electroshock that damaged Canadian patients beyond any hope of recovery, on behalf of US intelligence researchers. It was all too justifiable. It’s the Cold War, stupid. What other excuse did you need?

  And it hadn’t stopped with the McCarthy hysteria. I kept speed-reading, unable to look away. In 1967, when Mom was eight years old, more than five dozen prisoners in California were injected with a terrifying substance, succinylcholine, that made them feel that they were drowning in their own fluids. Waterboarding by any other name. Five of the prisoners refused permission, and were injected anyway, against their protests.

  I’m pretty sure I was looking green around the gills again. I sagged against the back of the chair, and L.C. got out and spun it around for me to collapse into.

  I looked at my Mom and Dad and . . . I know it’s vulgar, and trivializing, and entirely unjustified, but I felt a horror movie shiver, I did.

  “So you’re—genetic experiments? And I’m what? Son of Frankenstein?”

  “Not exactly,” my father said. “But close enough.” His grin seemed a bit strained; he was profoundly uncomfortable. One arm went around Mom’s shoulders, and she leaned against him.

  “The plasmid autoinserted into the nuclear DNA,” Paul told me. “It’s heritable. To some extent.”

  “So nohad to screw around with my genome? Wow,” I said, heavily, “imagine my relief.”

  “You’d be surprised how minor the changes are,” L.C. said. “Mostly it’s an unstable CHRM2 allele, plus downregulation of a dysbindin SNP.” I heard it as “snip” and at that stage didn’t know how to unpack the rest of it. We might be geniuses, but we have to read something to remember and understand it, and as I say I’d tended to delegate microbiology to Ruthie. Shockingly sexist, no doubt. “It’s like the small modifications that caused the chimpanzee to go in one direction and H. sapiens in another. In this case, an extra cortical rind added atop the six human layers of cortex, thicker and more numerous axonal connections, some neurotransporter oddities. It doesn’t always,” she added, with a glance she deflected even as it began, “breed true.”

  I had know all my life that I’m not remotely as smart as the Atom Kids. Sure, beat the academic pants off a Cliff Dolejsi; run circles from infancy around children three times my own age (but it was getting a little harder these days), yet I had to admit that I just wasn’t transcendentally brilliant like the ‘rents. At my age they’d been publishing biographies and novels and advanced theses in math and poli sci. Ruth had her software patents, true, and I’d published that fat fantasy trilogy before I got tired of reading made-up stuff and disgorging imitations, but I wasn’t hearing anything unexpected. Still, it stung. It stung like a son of a bitch.

  “Regression toward the mean,” I said.

  “Absent any extra modifications, I’m afraid so. And worse than that—most pregnancies in our group kept miscarrying. We all tried desperately for ten years or so, then Kuzi finally worked out the haplotypy problem and we . . . ” Mom trailed away.

  “It’s an inbreeding problem, mostly,” Dad told me. “We found a way, but it involved some sacrifices.”

  They were all looking at Paul Westfall. His face did not move, but his eyes fixed on me.

  “With the help of good old nature, and nature’s God,” he said. He crossed the room to me, took both my hands firmly in his own. A thumb closed over the knuckles of my right hand in a firm, professional clasp, the deft grip of a man who’d never done any real physical work in his life, never worked combinations in a dojo. I’d seen that thick, blunt thumb shape before, every day of my life. How could I never have noticed? He smiled, finally. “Yes, Bud, belay what I said earlier. You have every right to call me father.”

  Was I angry?

  Hell, yes.

  I swallowed down that anger, because it’s what we’d been trained to do, and because, really, I loved the guy. Paul Westfall was the first of the Atom Kids located by Dr. Herbert, and perhaps, by all accounts, the brightest. He’d done as much as anyone in rounding up the rest, easing them, one by one and then in concert, through the trauma and triumph of their self-discovery, their redemption from extremity and bitter isolation. In the joint foolishness and longing for absolutes of the Patriarch’s medievalism, he and L.C., my mother, had cultivated their immense minds into a shared folie, but hardly a radical one, an architecture of belief and worship shared, after all, by many of the finest minds in Western history, and even today by a large percentage of the planet. I’d confronted or avoided their faith for years, in a mutinous but largely unspoken resistance. Not hostility; how can you turn against the woman who gave you birth? But they both knew the antagonism I nurtured toward their beliefs. And now—

  —No more than a hypocritical imposture! raged the furious two-year old locked inside me. Faked piety! Bogus fidelity to spouse and church!

  Knowing, even as the spasm made my arm tremble and withdrew my hand from his, how unfair, reductive, patronizing, adolescent, for God’s sake, I was being.

  Qualia, I noted. I noticed that abstract fact from a higher, remoter part of my aggrieved self. Bursts and gusts of feeling, trammeled as swiftly as they arose in rationalizations and language games. Yet how could that fury be calculated, specified by neural algorithm, traced back to Darwinian adaptations and Machiavellian maneuvers? Well, easily enough, in fact. I knew that. But the logic tree of abstractions didn’t feel true.

  Deliberately, I shut down this noisy inner babble. I turned my face away from the Hard Problem and from the present instant’s merely Absurd Problem churning in my mind and body.

  Yeah, you bet I was angry.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said, turning away from them and opening the study door on a quiet house. Nowaited out there; even Marius had gone home. “I have to take Scarf out for a crap.”

  My mother and father, and the priest who was merely my sperm-donor, in vitro or in vivo I didn’t care, and their aged Patriarch, they all four let me leave, in silence, and without reproach. Well, I suppose they were getting used to it. Emotionally, we are all quite simple creatures, H. sapiens. and H. novissimus alike.

  I found Scarf’s chain on its hook and went out into the cool of the night, my dog capering happily at my heels.