Khan Read online

  “Genghis Khan, huh?”

  “I can’t pretend I’m sure about any of this,” Seth hedged. “I’m just guessing, based on when someone seems a standout. And lucky enough. Genghis Khan died old, Alexander the Great didn’t - I don’t know if someone being somewhere else, inclined differently, could have saved Alexander, but it’s suggestive that he wasn’t running on our kind of luck.”

  Justin nodded. “I’ll need to explain to Mary.”

  “Why?” said Seth. “I don’t think she’ll believe you. You believe me because you’ve had the kind of charmed life I described - she wasn’t there for half of it. And she won’t want to know about how she was influenced to fall in love with you, who wants to hear that?” He took another jam dot. They were pretty good.

  “It’s a major life decision!” said Justin.

  “Not if you’re adopting all your kids anyway,” Seth said around his cookie. “And she’ll go along with it fine as long as you want her to. I suppose if you have horrible misgivings and you want an excuse to avoid it then maybe instead -”

  “Please stop talking about my wife that way.”

  “Suit yourself. But even if you tell her about the vasectomy, and I really think you could just as well skip that, you don’t have to tell her about the gene. It won’t help anything, and it could hurt.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Justin. There was another silence. “I’m going to get some milk to go with these cookies.”

  “Thanks,” said Seth.

  After Justin brought back the milk and poured some for each of them, he said, “Can you tell me about the others? Their names were - Darius and Destiny?”

  “Yeah. So, George never married my mother, but he did keep coming back to her for a while, openly, after she’d had me and gotten wise about taking the pill so I don’t have any full siblings, and Destiny and Darius’s moms were another couple of women he was also more or less publicly involved with, so we knew each other a little. I used to babysit Darius. Destiny’s between my age and yours. I don’t think they have the gene, Darius dropped out of high school and hangs out with druggies and Destiny lives with her girlfriend in a shoebox and keeps turning up with bruises.” He washed down the last bite of his jam dot.

  “You said you had more examples.”

  “I do. I’ve met George, he was the only person I knew who moved through people and institutions like they’re air the way I can. Darius has a little sister, Jasmine, and she’s doing suspiciously well at everything she tries. It’s not enough to get any of us whisked away by men in labcoats, sure, but it was enough to get me thinking about it, get me testing it a little -”

  “Did you kick a cop?” asked Justin tiredly.

  “No, but I’ve done the pizza one. Guy looked pleased to have a chance to help me out. I’ve wandered into employees-only areas prepared to pretend to be lost. Nobody called me on it. I get seats in packed restaurants and tickets to sold-out concerts. I try risky shit in court, at first well shy of what it’d take for a client to sue me for mishandling the case, later - less careful. I win. I always win.”

  “God,” said Justin.

  “If you say so. George was a weird pick for chosen one.”

  “Well, mysterious ways,” said Justin. “What are they like? Darius and Destiny and Jasmine?”

  “Darius is a good kid. Don’t let the arrest for murder fool you, that was all over how George treated his mama, he loves his mama. Publicly acknowledged relationship doesn’t mean consensual relationship. And it could only last till Jasmine found out and wanted it to stop, see, after that the effect canceled out and Darius…” Seth mimed a gunshot.

  “You’re very casual about that.”

  “I’m a criminal lawyer, I’ve heard worse. I’d be more formal about it in a courthouse. If I felt like being formal that day, anyway.”

  “I think maybe you should quit,” said Justin.

  “What? Why would I do that?” Seth laughed.

  “You’re pushing people all the time. And not over opinions on dolphins - and I might quit too, even just that is sketchy -”

  “There’s no ‘too’. I like my job and I intend on keeping it,” said Seth.

  “The judges, the jurors, the defendants, their victims -”

  “I’m very suited to it,” said Seth. “Look, I’m just existing. We can’t help how we’re made. Nobody’s going home with a mysterious nosebleed, nobody’s lying awake having a dark night of the soul over why they thought my client was innocent when in retrospect he wasn’t, and the power can just as easily bring me people who ought to get off and might not with a worse lawyer as it can bring me crooks who ought not benefit from my silver tongue, right?”

  “Does it? Do you get a lot of people who were framed?” wondered Justin quietly.

  “More than your average lawyer. Not all of them. Everybody deserves a defense, Justin, even if I’m getting them off on reasonable doubt or technicalities those are doubts and technicalities that are judicially supposed to affect the trial.” Seth’s voice was casual, but his eyes had narrowed.

  “I just think that given how the power apparently responds to our goals, we should try to maintain goals that don’t put our - our wills? Our needs? in conflict with many other people in high-stakes situations. And criminal law - even contract law would be better, wouldn’t it? Less likely to hurt somebody in their personal life, you know?”

  “The training is not interchangeable, it’s not like I’ve been selling sofas and can turn that sales experience into selling beer.”

  “Well - even so -”

  “I’m not going to tank my career because you want more folks to wind up in prison, Justin.”

  “I’m getting a vasectomy on your say-so,” Justin pointed out.

  “Yeah, because you bought my argument. Because when there’s a growing population with a luck advantage everybody else loses out in the short run and nobody wins in the long run. Not because I told you that your kids would get good grades in art class and be popular with their peers and might do real well if they went into law. Or into anything else, honestly, what can’t people going where you need them to be help with?”

  “Math?” said Justin. “Sports? - no, in sports I guess it could handicap competition for you -”

  “And in math, sure, maybe you need to produce proofs that actually prove things, but if you can hack it as a mathematician at all - if you can do any math work, even if you do it slowly and it’s not very… whatever it is mathematicians look for in publications… then everyone will figure that’s good enough. Your students’ll love you, and nobody’ll notice or care if you plagiarize -”

  “I’d like to think none of my children will grow up to be plagiarists, biological or adopted -” protested Justin.

  “Sure, but you can’t count on that actually sinking in, nobody’s dad says ‘remember, Junior, when you grow up, always steal the intellectual work of others’, do they? And even if you assume they’re completely on the up and up they’ll have the best teachers for their learning style and the most helpful classmates and access to tutors and this won’t compensate for not being able to add but it’ll get them from passing calc to a job in the field if that’s what they want. It all comes down to what you want.”

  Justin sighed. “Law just seems like a bridge too far.”

  “What a pity we didn’t meet when I was undeclared in college,” said Seth, “you could have tried pushing me into development economics or something like that and I’d gaze at my navel harmlessly day in and day out.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Yes. Sorry. Habit. Most people take it well, you know, I get used to it.”

  Justin sighed. “I probably have unbecoming habits nobody’s ever called me on, too, don’t I.”

  “You seem pretty inoffensive but the dolphin’s terrible.”

  “You’ve said.”

  Seth laughed. “Anyway. I don’t want to get too tired to drive to my hotel, so if we’re agreed on the vasectomy and not having to tell Mary about it -”

  “I’m still not sure about not telling Mary.”

  “Well, don’t tell her till you’re sure, then, you can’t un-tell her. And run it by me first, I’m the only person you can run a train of thought by without your audience just telling you what you want to hear,” Seth added.

  “All right. We’ll see you tomorrow morning? Breakfast is at seven,” said Justin.

  “Oooh, breakfast,” said Seth. “I’ll be there. What is it?”

  “Oh, whatever Mary feels like making -”

  “Whatever you’re in the mood for,” corrected Seth. “When Mary makes breakfast she feels like making whatever you want. Tomorrow, that’s only unless I hate it, if I do then it’s really up to her. But I’m not picky. What’s for breakfast, Justin?”

  Justin narrowed his eyes at Seth. He delayed a moment before saying, “Waffles.”

  “Can’t wait,” said Seth, and he let himself out, humming a little.

  Breakfast the next morning was waffles. Seth accepted one loaded with strawberries and whipped cream. The little girls were curious about who Seth was, but Justin hurried the older one onto the school bus and sent the middle girl to pretend to read a story to the infant rather than answer the questions they weren’t asking because he didn’t want to answer them. Mary kissed her husband and children goodbye and went off to work.

  “You think I’m doing them a favor, huh?” Justin said to Seth, moody. “The girls.”

  “Sure. I mean, compare it to the alternative, not to the perfect fantasy you’ve cooked up. You wouldn’t have gotten these specific ones without the gene, you’d have gotten different kids you got along with worse - it doesn’t only nudge them around once they come home with you, it arranges that you ge
t the right ones.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What, when you listen to Mary talk about before she met you does she sound awful, like she had some huge personality upheaval the day she met you?”

  “…no.”

  “And you love Mary, right?” asked Seth.

  “Of course,” snapped Justin.

  “So these ones would be worse off, with some higher conflict family they’re a worse fit for. And the ones you got instead would be only average fits, and average isn’t great for adoptions, last I heard.”

  “You’re very comfortable with all of this.”

  “I came around to it in my own time. You kind of got it sprung on you. I wouldn’t have, only there might be hundreds of us and I can’t spend six months getting to know each one before I explain why they need to avoid reproducing.”

  “What are you going to do,” Justin said, “when you find someone who won’t get sterilized? A half-sister, especially, more invasive surgery…”

  “It suffices if they get an IUD. What I really dread is finding another George.”

  “- but what will you do,” said Justin, “if you find one?”

  There was a silence. “Haven’t decided yet,” Seth said.

  “I don’t like that,” Justin replied. “You’re a little confrontational…”

  “I’m a lawyer.”

  “I’m well aware. But you’re going to be meeting all these people with the habits you’ve picked up from having the gene, and confront them, and tell them that for the good of humanity they’ve got to go under the knife, or the - whatever implement is involved in IUDs -”

  “That little interest in your marital birth control arrangements?”

  “Mary’s on the injected kind. Stop changing the subject.”

  Seth sighed. “I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s come as a big relief that you prefer adopting. But I can’t not try, can I? I can’t just let our gene sweep the globe unchecked, backing whatever random act of oppressing the have-nots that first appeals to one or two of our relatives at once. What would you have me do, Justin?”

  “- I don’t know. I’ll help you find people, I guess, and… we’ll figure something out. Keep me in the loop.”

  “Of course I will. What else would I do?” smiled Seth.

  A child - Valeria, the Colombian one, Seth surmised - required Justin’s attention. Seth said, “I’m going to go have a walk around the block, all right?”

  “Of course,” said Justin, distracted by getting some substance out of Valeria’s hair.

  Seth let himself out.

  A minute later, he was joined by a woman, too mixed-race to classify on sight, tall and taller with heels. She was between his and Justin’s ages, draped in clothes that could double as pajamas and carrying a latte. “Hello, little brother,” she said.

  “Hello, Destiny,” Seth said. “I thought I spotted your car earlier. What are you doing in this state?”

  “Following you,” she said. “Lifting fancy listening devices from Ye Olde Electronicks Shoppe. Brought my whole tae kwon do class with me and scattered them around, so don’t try shit.”

  “You know, I really didn’t think you had it,” said Seth.

  “My idea of success looks very different from yours, little brother.”

  “I guess it would have to. I didn’t need to know that about your kinks.”

  “Maybe we breed true, wouldn’t that be the darnedest thing?” Destiny said thoughtfully.

  “Darius,” said Seth.

  “Yes, all right, he’s going nowhere fast. Are we sure he’s really George’s?’

  “Positive,” Seth replied levelly.

  “Anyway. I want you to leave this nice man alone, little brother,” said Destiny. “He’s a sweetheart. And you are not.”

  “I haven’t hurt him one bit.”

  “You are not overcome with a desire to meet our far-flung relations out of a sense of kinship and you are definitely not trying to prevent the oppression of the have-nots. Whatever you are doing, I want you to leave that poor bunny rabbit with that nice family out of it.”

  “Are you planning to stalk me through my entire search, vetting each sibling for bunnyhood before I’m allowed to associate with them?” asked Seth incredulously. “Am I to be disinvited from Jasmine’s seventh birthday party on your say-so? Anyway, I don’t care what you want me to do.”

  “I know you don’t care. I can tell Justin, though, and you’ll rather have to care if we both want you to do something until you can explain to Jasmine how it’s relevant to unicorns, princesses, and sugar,” threatened Destiny. “Can’t push you, but two against one for everybody around you, and you’re all alone and didn’t come nearly clean enough with Justin to get him on your side once I’ve had a chat with him.”

  “You’ve thought this through.”

  “Your problem is that you can’t coordinate. Me, you, and Justin - that adds up to you lose. I don’t know what you have in mind but I know you’re a right bastard, Seth, and now that whatever it is involves prowling around, finding more of us, telling them not to have kids, feeding them lines about how much of an altruist you are, getting them on board with bits and pieces of your mystery plan… well, I don’t like it, and you’re gonna cut it out. Me, you, and Justin -”

  “Darius,” Seth said again.

  “What about him?” said Destiny. “He -”

  She was cut short by a bullet to the neck. Seth stopped walking. He watched her fall and choke on her blood. He put his hands over his mouth, shocked and upset body language for the benefit of any grainy camera footage that somebody’s household CCTV might collect. No one was watching, but they might not have turned off their electronics, and it paid to be a little careful.

  Through his fingers, he whispered, “What makes you think I can’t coordinate, bitch?”

  Destiny struggled to breathe. She failed, writhing on the sidewalk, reaching for him with one hand, eyes open wide and filmed with tears. She fell still. Her arm dropped.

  Seth, mindful of cameras, looked left, looked right, ducked behind a rhododendron as though fearful of being shot, pulled out his phone to call the police.

  The dispatcher forgot to ask his name and forgot to ask that he stay on the scene. Seth didn’t volunteer. He continued around the block, whistling a bit. “Thanks, bro,” he said. He wasn’t wearing an earpiece, so Darius couldn’t answer until Seth had reached his vantage point on the roof of the apartment building down the street. Darius had a change of clothes for him.

  “I guess my idea of success looks different from hers,” said Darius sourly. Seth laughed and clapped him on the back.

  He went back to Justin’s. He read Valeria an alphabet book six times. He took Justin and the girls out to lunch and bade them all farewell and went to catch his plane home.

  He texted his campaign manager, and he smiled.

 

 

  Hannah Blume, Khan

 

 

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