2034: Writing Rochester's Futures

By Nick DiChario

Where will you be in 2034? 2034: Writing Rochester's Futures attempts to address this question. Best-selling Nebula and Hugo Award-winning author Nancy Kress leads a tour of things to come, alongside Star Trek writer Sally Caves, two-time John W. Campbell Award finalist Nick DiChario, playwright/philosopher Craig DeLancey, and fourteen other Rochesterian masters of speculative fiction. With an Introduction by Nationally Syndicated Critic Jack Garner and a Foreword by University of Rochester Senior Science Writer Jonathan Sherwood, 2034 explores eighteen visions of where Rochester may find herself in her 200th year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R-SPEC Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780989962520

Nick DiChario

My short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. I have been nominated for the Hugo and a World Fantasy awards, and my first two novels, A Small and Remarkable Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008), both received nominations for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Novel of the Year. I've held many jobs since I was just a lad, including paperboy, dishwasher at a Catholic seminary, creative writing professor, indie bookstore owner, education director for a non-profit literary center, and writer/editor of corporate communications. I am a graduate of St. John Fisher College, and I earned my master’s degree from Empire State College in New York, focusing mainly on literature, philosophy, and writing. I love to read and write, and I am a lifelong mistake-maker. I hope you are too!

Book preview

2034

Writing Rochester’s Futures

2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures

R-SPEC Press

Published by R-SPEC Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2009 R-SPEC Press.

Garbage Plate is a trademark of Nick Tahou Hots, Inc.

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced in any fashion without the express, prior, written consent of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews. This is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters, apart from some well-known historical and/or public figures, are products of the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any situations, incidents, and/or dialogues concerning otherwise real persons are entirely fictional, are not intended to depict actual events, and do not change the entirely fictional nature of the work(s). In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Any trademark, trade name, and/or business name used herein is the property of its respective owner to which neither the authors nor R-SPEC lay any claim of ownership. Usage of such marks and/or names, as well as any properties, incidents, qualities, and/or events described herein with respect thereto, is incidental and in the context of a work of fiction, is purely fictional, should in no way be interpreted as depicting actual events and/or opinions related thereto, nor as reflecting any actual opinion of the authors, members, and/or governing bodies of R-SPEC.

ISBN 13: 978-0-9899625-2-0

First Edition

R-SPEC Press books are published by the Rochester Speculative Literature Association, Inc., a not-for-profit organization supported in part by contributions from its members.

Direct all correspondence to:

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Acknowledgments

It takes a great deal of talent and effort to pull together something like this.

Janice Carello led the project, received and acknowledged the manuscripts, massaged the files to make them anonymous for our committee of readers, and coordinated the selection process.

Alicia Henn, Craig DeLancey, Steve Carper, Ruhan Zhao, Tom Whittemore, Ben Chapman, Lyndsay Calusine, Eric Scoles (me), and Kim Gillett (most often our gracious host) met regularly to brainstorm, argue, and plan.

Kim Gillett, Craig DeLancey, Tom Whittemore, Ben Chapman, and Alicia Henn each read and ranked every story, other than their own, without knowing the identity of the author. As judges, they were restricted from voting for their own stories, but (along with Janice) worked together to arrive at the final manuscript selection.

Once the winning stories were selected, Janice created a pasteup (a rough advance copy used for pre-layout proofing) that was sent to Jack Garner, who had agreed to write an introduction. We’d like to thank Jack both for both the introduction and for taking the time to read that first version. We’d also like to thank Jonathan Sherwood for his accompanying foreword, his work on the marketing committee, and for founding r-spec in the first place.

Thanks as well to Paula Marchese and Sheryl de Jonge-Loavenbruck for proofing the pasteup, to David Henn for his generous help with the final text edits, and to David Pascal for the book’s cover and page design.

And finally, we would like to thank the most important contributors to this book—the writers themselves.

Eric Scoles

R-SPEC CTO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword - Jonathan Sherwood

Introduction - Jack Garner

GeneLove - Nancy Kress

Interesting Times - Eric Scoles

Culinary Capital, 2034 - Ben Chapman

Night Bells - Dana Paxson

2034 - Rory Gillett

Hollow Lives - Adele Ciccaglione

The Naked Girl - Sally Caves

Time Enough for Love - Gary A. Mitchell

Day of the Bicentennial - Lyndsay Ely

Picoat - Kim A. Gillett

One City at a Time - Craig DeLancey

Want Not - L.S. Gathmann

The Costs of Survival - Jamie Gilman Kress

Getting Wet - Tom Moran

Top 10 Headlines, Rochester, NY, 2034 - Nick DiChario

The 2034 Lilac Festival - Steven Donner

North Star Pipeline - Steve Carper

Scotch and Sizzlenuts on the Resolute Bay - Alicia Doty Henn

About the Authors

FOREWORD

By Jonathan Sherwood

Writing Rochester’s Futures.

The spring 2003 semester at the University of Rochester had just started when my English professor said something that, without being too dramatic about it, changed the direction of my life.

I meet every once in a while with a group of local science fiction writers …

I’m sure she said more after that but I think my brain locked up after it heard a group of local science fiction writers.

I had been writing fiction for many years and, like most writers, had been in and out of several different writing groups. Writing groups are a different breed of beast from most social organizations, such as book clubs or auto enthusiast meetings, where the purpose is to enjoy the company of like-minded folk. When you go to a writer’s meeting, you go with your ego hanging out like a piñata. You’re laying bare your creation, which is almost always an intimate reflection of yourself in some way, and you’re hoping your colleagues will sing its praises. But, as is wont to happen with a piñata, your ego has to go through a bit of bruising before you can come away with the goodies.

Too often that delicate balance between bruising and bonbons is upset, and that’s when a writing group fails. You may be receiving nothing but criticism or nothing but encouragement, neither of which helps you become a better writer. Or you might be writing in a genre that nobody else in the group knows what to do with.

The latter had been my problem. For ten years I’d been writing literary fiction that was, admittedly, weird. While it wasn’t blatant science fiction, it was something that clearly sat poorly with the literary writers groups I drifted through. I called it a hybrid of Henry Miller and Ray Bradbury—a description that didn’t clarify anything for anyone.

I hadn’t known it then, but I had been living in the land of the great gray area known as Speculative Fiction.

Somewhere between the stark realism of George Eliot and the fantastical stories of Jules Verne is a type of fiction that uses unrealistic elements to explore very real issues of the human condition. Think of the ghosts of Hamlet, or the Big Brother of 1984—clearly these are not meant to be taken literally, yet they are key to the underlying point of the stories in that they allow us to look at an issue from a safe perspective. In 2006, all of Rochester was invited to read Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451, a story of a future where all books are banned. Firemen were charged with the task of burning books, rather than fighting fires, and society became militant and trite. One fireman secretly keeps some of the books he is sent to burn, and in reading them he begins to understand what is lost when free will and deep contemplation are excised from a society. Written in 1953 about the not-too-far future, the novel is a classic of literature, and yet it digs deeply into the repercussions of an issue that is fresh on the minds of the American voter as we hear rumors that a vice-presidential candidate may have sought to ban books from her local library. Likewise, the recently resurrected television series Battlestar Galactica devoted half a season to the plight of humans living in internment camps under the occupation of an invading alien species. When the humans turn to suicide bombings in a desperate attempt to survive, it’s hard not to cheer for their victories even though the reflection of Iraq and the moral ambiguities therein are painfully uncomfortable. The unreal setting can give us a little distance from the things we normally hold very close and lets us look at them with an objectivity we couldn’t otherwise tolerate.

I would like to say that I had been exploring speculative writing in an attempt to achieve similar noble goals, but the truth is that I didn’t know any other way to do what I wanted to do. Without a good, honest, able, and professional writing group to help me grow as a writer, I was merely writing randomly and relying on trial and error to learn what worked. One lesson I’d clearly learned from my stints with various writing groups was that only writers with a familiarity with fantasy or science fiction seemed to understand what I was trying to do with this weird fiction. But finding these writers in Rochester, it seemed, was an impossibility.

So, when my University of Rochester professor, Sarah Higley, who had penned a few memorable Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, mentioned that she knew of not just a few, but an entire herd of serious science fiction writers in the area, I made a beeline for her after the class.

Yes, there’s a loose group of professional science fiction writers that meets every now and then, she said, but I could tell from her tone that she was hesitant to be any more welcoming. If I was going to be allowed anywhere near this group, I was going to have to prove my worth. Groucho Marx said he didn’t want to be a part of any group that would have him as a member, and, likewise, I realized I had to be a better writer than I was if I was going to get invited to this group.

Sarah’s class was a science fiction writing class, so for my final project in the class, I set about writing the first pure science fiction story I’d written since my teens. I loved working with the class, critiquing and discussing stories from authors at all skill levels, teaching some and learning from all of them, but at the end of the semester, there was one question I wanted answered. Was I good enough? Would Sarah introduce me to the mythic collection of professional Rochester science fiction writers?

No.

As it turned out, the group had essentially disbanded halfway through the semester. But Sarah invited me to a party in Perinton over the summer where several of these writers would allegedly surface. On a sunny Saturday afternoon I drove to an unknown house, knocked on an unknown door, and walked into a party where I knew no one. I couldn’t have been more nervous if I were going to a job interview unannounced.

Fortunately, it turned out that these writers were mostly like normal people; the same number of limbs and eyes and not a jaunty black beret among them. I met many of the authors that appear in the following pages—Alicia Doty Henn, Steve Carper, Dana Paxson—and several others who I couldn’t know at the time would end up great friends of mine. As I tried in barely hidden desperation to demonstrate that I was not a social misfit who regularly shows up at random parties, I was asked the same question by several people: Are you taking Nancy’s class at Writers & Books in the fall?

Of course, I said. I knew of Rochester’s Writers & Books, certainly, but I didn’t know what class or what Nancy anyone was talking about. Of course seemed like the right answer, so I said it and then raced home to look it up on the web. Nancy Kress, one of the most well respected writers in the science fiction world, was teaching a speculative fiction course at Writers & Books. I signed up.

For those of you who are writers in the Rochester area, you may already know what a gold mine our city has in Writers & Books, for any kind of literature. In Nancy Kress’ class I found a dozen other authors who truly understood speculative literature, and, more importantly, authors who were passionate about their writing. Under Nancy’s excellent guidance, we worked hard to learn and help each other. By the end of the class, a number of us formed our own writing critique group along with many of the members of the old professional group that had dissolved the year before.

The group, known as D309 after the room number in the Village Gate Square where the old professional group used to meet, grew over the next two years, eventually adding subsections to cater specifically to short story writers and novel writers. What started as a few writers looking for someone else who understood the weird stuff became a community of nearly three dozen.

With the realization that there were so many dedicated writers of speculative fiction in the Rochester area, the group spun off a public face—R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association (you’d think a bunch of writers could come up with a name that accurately reflected the acronym, but you’d be wrong). R-SPEC served a mission to help foster new writers, help develop current writers, and help promote all Rochester’s writers of speculative literature.

What you’re now holding is the latest fruit of the thriving community that is Rochester’s R-SPEC. It’s a look forward to the bicentennial year of our fair city. It’s a guess at what living in Rochester in the year 2034 might entail, told from the perspective of local scientists, professors, business owners, doctors, playwrights, and artists, who all live here in the city and write in the future.

Jonathan Sherwood

Founder of R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association

●

INTRODUCTION

By Jack Garner

The future is now. So goes the old cliché.

Lord help us if that’s true.

As I write this, Rochester and the rest of America have just completed one of the most mean-spirited and divisive political campaigns ever, banks are in collapse, gasoline prices are soaring, retirement income is flying out the window, and a vice presidential candidate’s chief asset is apparently the ability to shoot a moose from a helicopter.

In Rochester, drugs and violence are still problems, especially in the crescent area, the Lake Ontario ferry is a lost cause, city schools are struggling, Eastman Kodak is no longer Rochester’s chief employer, and Midtown Plaza is facing the wrecking ball. Thank God you can still get an Abbott’s ice cream cone, see a good movie at the Little, and order up a white hot.

Still, if things are going to look good in time for our bicentennial in 2034, we all need to get to work.

But where will we find inspiration? I suggest it should come, at least in part, from the artists in our midst, and primarily the writers. That’s the idea behind 2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures. In it, 18 writers, ranging from an award-winning science-fiction author to a high school poet, contribute tales set in the Rochester of the bicentennial year. Some offer serious predictions of the way life may be; others tweak our hopes with humor.

Kicking off the collection is the estimable Nancy Kress, who holds all the major science fiction honors, including four Nebulas, a Hugo, a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and a Sturgeon.

Kress foresees a community, perhaps correctly, in which genetics research thrives at the University of Rochester Medical Center. (She sees us as number three in the nation 25 years down the road, behind only Boston and the I-270 corridor in Maryland.)

Since the UR is already Rochester’s top employer and its medical research labs are buzzing, it’s a safe bet the UR will be a major player in Rochester’s future. But, interestingly, Kress also sees Kodak back in the game, thanks to a company division devoted to virtual reality, which may be a major part of our lifestyle by 2034. Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

For fun, there’s Ben Chapman’s story of a food competition, a 2034 variation of the Iron Chef, with a notable Rochester cook taking on the best of Manhattan. The judging is more refined and specific than in 2009, thanks to pleasure meters that accurately measure the delight of each savored morsel. However, are you ready to believe that the home of the Garbage Plate will one day battle for culinary supremacy of the nation?

If you define fun more perversely, check out Lyndsay Ely’s Day of the Bicentennial. What a thrill! Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass return for the celebration. Oh, but wait. Now they’re zombies. U-o-o-o-w-e, gross! (Horror fans will love the fact that the zombie Douglass goes by Freddy.) There’s a certain sick appropriateness to a zombie tale in the collection, since one of Rochester’s chief attractions has long been a cemetery (Mount Hope).

The student contributions include 2034, a well-done but very gloomy poem from Brighton junior Rory Gillett. It’s kind of sad to think that one of the most cynical pieces in the collection is from the book’s youngest contributor. Perhaps, we all have to grow into hope. I trust his generation will, because they’ll be the ones who’ll fashion 2034. (Admittedly, it’s our generation’s job to provide them with the tools they’ll need, and to leave them a future worth salvaging. So far, we’re not doing so good.)

Experienced writer L.S. Gathmann’s Want Not is cynical as well, in its own bittersweet way, but it’s also a lyrically beautiful story, one of the most potent in the collection. Among other things, Gathmann foresees a hothouse world, the payoff for our slow and insubstantial response to global warming.

Along the way, you’ll also read stories of magnet-powered canal boats (the efforts to rekindle interest in the Erie Canal apparently never end), the still-continuing Lilac Festival, and so much more.

Good friend Nick DiChario—who suggested I write this introduction—offers an entertaining piece which covers a lot of ground because he offers Top 10 Headlines, Rochester, N.Y., 2034, and then goes on to briefly explain each one.

You’ll especially want to read how Wegmans Introduces Bug Bar, and how Retail Stores Poised to Return Downtown. And then there’s Nick’s report on the final retirement of Louise Slaughter from Congress at age 105!

Nick and I would often discuss sci-fi as a writing and reading option when we’d meet at Rochester’s beloved and essential Writers & Books, where he’d teach writing (hard work) and I’d show movies (a far more easy gig). I’d tell Nick how I liked sci-fi in my youth, and especially preferred the more poetic and less scientific of the writers, with Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Roald Dahl among my favorites. (Yes, I realize it could be argued that Vonnegut and Dahl aren’t sci-fi writers at all, but both often employed speculative fantasy within their writing.)

And, if pressed to name a favorite work of speculative fiction, I’d call it a toss-up from among Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I also liked Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, though I hated the same author’s militaristic and somewhat fascist Starship Trooper. (It’s incredible to think they were written by the same guy.)

However, I lost interest at some point, distracted most likely when I discovered the literature of Hemingway, the pleasures of good biographies, the plays of Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare, and, of course, the world of the movies. (At least films continued to peak my interest in speculative tales, whether they be Alien, Blade Runner2001, Close Encounters, or Steven Spielberg’s under-appreciated later films, A.I. and Minority Report.

However, Nick has brought me ’round, in part by sending me a copy of his unique and thought-provoking debut novel, A Small and Remarkable Life. Speculative fiction won’t dominate my library or my bedside table, but it will certainly once again be part of the mix.

The stories in this collection have reminded me how much we can learn about today by speculating on aspects of tomorrow, whether the writer takes a serious or comic tack. And how about when that speculation involves your own community and perhaps your own life, if you’re lucky to have another quarter-century in your biological clock?

Though my wife and I are both Pennsylvania natives, Rochester’s been our home longer than any other place—38 years and counting. It’s where we raised three children and where one of them still lives and is bringing up two of our grandchildren.

There is much I love about Rochester and I hope those aspects continue to thrive in 2034. I would still want to see the world’s films and images preserved at the George Eastman House. I’d still want to enjoy Finger Lakes wine, locally brewed beer, and a good chicken wing. I hope I can still drive down the Thruway to cheer for the Buffalo Bills.

If we still go out in public to enjoy movies, I hope it’s at the Little. And I know I’d thoroughly enjoy the 33rd annual Rochester International Jazz Festival in June 2034.

Maybe by 2034 someone will realize that Toronto should foot the bill for a ferry, it’ll be up and running, and we’d be able to sail over there from Charlotte. (Although, by 2034 maybe we’d only have to step into a transporter room to get zapped all around the world. Who knows?)

The 18 writers of 2034: Writing Rochester’s Futures have clearly provoked my curiosity. If we’re all still around 25 years into the future, let’s be sure to gather at Two Vine or Max’s, my two favorite (and hopefully still thriving) downtown restaurants.

We’ll celebrate the writers who got the future right—and tease the ones who didn’t.

For now, let’s gratefully enjoy their thought-provoking efforts.

Jack Garner

●

GENELOVE

By Nancy Kress

ONE

You look like hell, Susan said as soon as I came into the office. Carousing last night, CeeCee?

Ha ha, I said sourly. Last night was Sunday. I only carouse Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

I can imagine, Susan said. You have a client in ten minutes.

No problem. I headed for the bathroom.

We were both lying.

I hadn’t been carousing. Placid, even-keeled Susan couldn’t imagine what I had been doing, even though she knew perfectly well why I’d been doing it. And in my current state, a client in ten minutes was a problem. But Susan was sensitive—she wouldn’t have been such a good assistant if she weren’t—and our mutual fiction, that my sleeplessness was due to high living, let her show concern without prying. With such necessary fictions is the machinery of small businesses kept oiled. Ours was as small as you can get: Susan, me, and—indirectly—the reason I’d been sleepless and pacing and drinking most of the night.

He was on the phone when I emerged from a fruitless session in front of the mirror. Powder, lipstick, under-eye concealer—make-up can only do so much. It’s not like I could afford regrown skin. My head hurt. Susan mouthed Derek, turned her desk screen to face me, and diplomatically pretended intense absorption in paperwork.

You look like hell, Derek said.

Thank you. I always could count on you for support.

Can’t resist sniping, can you, CeeCee? What the fuck have you done now? What is this lawsuit about?

Lawsuit? I looked at Susan, who held up a packet of official-looking papers.

Derek said, I was served at 8:00 this morning and I assume you were, too. Don’t play dumb with me!

I wasn’t playing dumb; I was dumb. My soon-to-be-ex-husband’s eyes blazed. Derek has the bluest eyes on the planet: Mediterranean blue, robin’s egg blue, childhood skies blue. The blue glittered with anger, which God knows I’d seen enough of from him, but also with something that in anyone else I would have taken for fear. Despite myself, and despite everything of surpassing awfulness that had transpired between us in the surpassingly awful last year, I was swept with dumb longing. This divorce was his idea, not mine. His and Penelope’s. I had delayed it every way I could, but I couldn’t stop it. It was going to happen. When I could speak again, I said, Derek, I just got to the office and I have a client in— Behind me, the office door opened —right now. I’ll call you later.

Susan was already saying warmly, Welcome to GeneLove, Mr. Brandon, and I took a deep breath, stuck a smile on my face, and turned around to greet yet another love-starved skeptic I would have to convert.

Tell me how it works, John Brandon said.

He wasn’t our usual customer. Mid-forties, brusque, conservatively dressed, he didn’t seem like a man who would go to a matchmaker. GeneLove gets the younger crowd, comfortable with new technology, sleek and affluent from buying Kodak stock just before the big VR breakthrough of ’26.

I said, Recent studies at the U of R Med Center and other places have confirmed what earlier studies suggested, that—

What earlier studies? he interrupted. His lips, thin and almost colorless, scowled. I took another peep at his client profile on my desk screen; he wasn’t a scientist. He was a Kodak engineer.

Well, the first study goes back over thirty-five years, all the way to the end of the last century. I couldn’t remember the exact date or the principal investigator’s name. Another fall-out of last night’s sleeplessness-cum-brandy. Volunteers were asked to wear tee-shirts for a few days straight, without showering. Afterwards, they sniffed the armpits of all the other tee-shirts and ranked them in order of attractiveness and—

Smelly tee-shirts off unwashed bodies were ‘attractive’?

Well, then, in order of least repulsiveness. I was losing patience with him. This wasn’t going to be a sale. And who had done that study? Derek wasn’t worth this much agonizing. I knew that. It didn’t help. "What the scientists found was that the volunteers were all most attracted to pheromones from those with genomes most different from theirs. It was an olfactory confirmation of that old saw, ‘Opposites attract.’ Or to put it another way: The nose knows."

This line, which usually brought at least a smile, got me nothing. I decided I didn’t like Brandon.

Since then, I continued, genetic work at the Medical Center and some of its biotech spin-off companies has greatly refined the information. We know which genes produce pheromones, we know which combinations of genetic profiles yield the greatest attraction between people, and we can match you with a woman who will absolutely knock your socks off! Big smile. My teeth hurt.

Nothing.

In addition, I said, "we provide a complete gene scan of both your profiles to look for any potential inheritable diseases in your future children, and advise you on in vitro fertilization techniques to avoid potential problems."

Brandon said, How much?

After I saw him out, I said to Susan, Pheromones or no pheromones, a woman will take one look at John Brandon’s scowl and jump off High Falls. What’s this lawsuit? Did you read it?

Yes. She looked grim, and it took a lot to bring out grim on Susan’s comfortable, middle-aged face. All day she sat in our tiny outer office, cheerfully processing files and DNA scans and appointments and billing and advertising and calls from lonely singles, without ever losing her poise. My own poise had disappeared when Derek announced that he was in love with a corporate attorney with breasts the size of basketballs. The couple suing are Hannah and James Klein. The suit names you personally, GeneLove, and GeneScan. It claims fraud, and they want fifty million dollars.

I gripped the edge of her desk. "Fifty million dollars? Fraud? What kind of fraud?"

They claim … let me see, this legal language is hard…. They claim that you guaranteed no genetic diseases in their offspring, and their son has autism.

"Impossible. The genes for autism are known. It would have been scanned for. And anyway, we don’t ‘guarantee’ anything! That lawyer we used to set up the company—what’s his name—he made us deliberately not use the word ‘guarantee’—fifty million dollars!—what was his name—"

Calm down, CeeCee, Susan said. You set up the company before I came on board—remember? But the lawyer’s name will be in the incorporation files. Just give me a minute….

While she brought up the encrypted programs on her screen, I leaned over to put my head between my knees. Fifty million dollars was far beyond the reach of both Derek’s company and mine. Both were spin-offs from the cutting-edge genetic work at the University of Rochester, where Derek had been a geneticist until he left to start GeneScan. I had started GeneLove eighteen months ago and was now keeping it alive with Derek’s lump-sum divorce payment to me. Pay-back for having put him through graduate school instead of going myself. No payment, of course, for the pain of a broken shared dream. Now I did the matchmaking, and fuck how ironic that was, and we sent the skin sample to GeneScan, which mapped the relevant areas of each client’s DNA, which were the genes involved in producing sex pheromones and those for known inheritable diseases.

There are a dozen other genescan companies in Rochester that you could use, my friends all said, and of course they were right. Rochester had become the third-largest commercial biotech center in the country, right behind Boston and the I-270 corridor in Maryland. The city bustled with little pharmas, with mop shops developing bacteria to eat toxic chemicals, with tissue-culturing labs. So why use Derek’s company? I never answered my friends. I never had to; they already knew. I was still trying to hang onto my shattered marriage. Which, as soon as the divorce was final, was probably going to become Penelope Galetta’s marriage.

Susan said, The lawyer is William Black, with Harmon, Sedley, and Black.

I remembered him now. The junior partner in a second-rate firm, which was all I’d been able to afford. I straightened up, but my head still felt light. My eyes ached from last night’s crying jag. My hair hurt.

Into my head popped the name Brandon had asked me for, the scientists who had done the original pheromone match-making studies: Claus Wedekind and Sandra Füri in Switzerland. Remembered too late—like everything else in