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Nancy Kress

TOMORROW’S KIN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my agent, the wonderful Eleanor Wood; my terrific editor, Beth Meacham; my husband, Jack Skillingstead, the best of first readers; and my dear friend Dr. Maura Glynn-Thami, who saves me from so many medical errors in all my fiction.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

S minus 10. 5 months

The publication party was held in the dean’s office, which was supposed to be an honor. Oak-paneled room, sherry in little glasses, small-paned windows facing the quad—the room was trying hard to be a Commons someplace like Oxford or Cambridge, a task for which it was several centuries too late. The party was trying hard to look festive. Marianne’s colleagues, except for Evan and the dean, were trying hard not to look too envious, or at their watches.

“Stop it,” Evan said at her from behind the cover of his raised glass.

“Stop what?”

“Pretending you hate this. ”

“I hate this,” Marianne said.

“You don’t. ”

He was half right. She didn’t like parties but she was proud of her paper, which had been achieved despite two years of gene sequencers that kept breaking down, inept graduate students who contaminated samples with their own DNA, murmurs of “Lucky find” from Baskell, with whom she’d never gotten along. Baskell, an old-guard physicist, saw her as a bitch who refused to defer to rank or to back down gracefully in an argument. Many people, Marianne knew, saw her as some variant of this. The list included two of her three grown children.

Outside the open casements, students lounged on the grass in the mellow October sunshine. Three girls in cut-off jeans played Frisbee, leaping at the blue flying saucer and checking to see if the boys sitting on the stone wall were watching. Feinberg and Davidson, from Physics, walked by, arguing amiably. Marianne wished she were with them instead of at her own party.

“Oh God,” she said to Evan, “Curtis just walked in. ”

The president of the university made his ponderous way across the room. Once he had been an historian, which might be why he reminded Marianne of Henry VIII. Now he was a campus politician, as power-mad as Henry but stuck at a second-rate university where there wasn’t much power to be had. Marianne held against him not his personality but his mind; unlike Henry, he was not all that bright. And he spoke in clichés.

“Dr. Jenner,” he said, “congratulations. A feather in your cap, and a credit to us all. ”

“Thank you, Dr. Curtis,” Marianne said.

“Oh, ‘Ed,’ please. ”

“Ed. ” She didn’t offer her own first name, curious to see if he remembered it. He didn’t. Marianne sipped her sherry.

Evan jumped into the awkward silence. “I’m Dr. Blanford, visiting post-doc,” he said in his plummy British accent. “We’re all so proud of Marianne’s work. ”

“Yes! And I’d love for you to explain to me your innovative process—ah, Marianne. ”