Frameshift

For her part, Molly did dress a little more fancily than she normally would, wearing a powder blue silk top and a stylish black skirt. She even put on some lipstick and eye shadow.

They’d borrowed the elaborate camera and tripod from the university.

Two chairs were set up in front of the fireplace, and Molly carefully framed the shot.

Amanda was in a lovely pink dress with small flowers on it. Molly had toyed with fighting the stereotype, but for today, at least, she wanted her daughter to look just like any other little girl. Sometimes such things did matter.

Finally, Pierre said, “I think… I’m ready.”

Molly smiled and helped him into one of the chairs. His right forearm was moving a little bit, but once he was settled in, Pierre moved his left hand over it, holding it steady. Molly sat down, smoothed out her clothes, and signed for Amanda to come and sit in her lap. She did so, enjoying flouncing across the room in her skirt.

Molly kissed her forehead, and Amanda grinned. In her left hand Molly held the remote control for the camera. She pointed a finger at the lens and told Amanda to look into it and smile.

Pierre lifted his left hand from his right arm and he, too, smiled when he saw that it was, at least for the moment, no longer flailing. He managed to slowly raise it up and drape it around his wife’s shoulders. Little Amanda reached up with her small hand and grasped three of her father’s fingers. Molly squeezed the remote, and first the preflash and then the real flash went off.

Amanda bounced in her mother’s lap, startled but excited by the bright lights. Molly waited for her to settle down a bit before trying another exposure and, while she did so, she reflected on what a truly remarkable family portrait they were making. It wasn’t just a woman and her husband and their child, a mother, father, and daughter all very much in love. It was also, in a very real sense, a portrait of the human race — of silence, of speech, and of telepathy, of past, present, and future, of where it had come from, where it is, and where it is going.

Molly’s telepathy, here, now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, had been an accident — the result of a single nucleotide having squeezed its way into her DNA. But the genetic code to produce the telepathy neurotransmitter was there, hidden, frameshifted into something else, in the DNA of every man and woman on earth.

Molly’s words came back to her: “Maybe someday far in the future, humanity might be able to handle something like this. But not now; it’s not the right time.”

Not the right time.

Pierre’s discoveries had been astounding: it was all in there. Not just what we had been. Not just codes to make tails and scales and hard-shelled eggs. Not just our fishy and amphibious and reptilian past.

Not just the commands that played out the dance of ontogeny apparently recapitulating phylogeny during an embryo’s development. Not just leftovers and discards.

Not just junk.

Yes, the past was in there. But so was the future. So was the blueprint, the master plan, what we would become.

What was it she had said to Pierre, all those years ago? “God planned out all the broad strokes in advance — the general direction life would take, the general path for the universe — but, after setting everything in motion, he’s content to simply watch it all unfold, to let it grow and develop on its own, following the course he laid down.”

She squeezed the camera’s remote again. Illumination was everywhere.

Amanda looked up at her father and moved her hands. Why are we doing this ?

“We’re doing this,” said Pierre, “because we’re a family.” The words came out slowly but clearly.

Amanda’s large brown eyes looked up at him. Her face contorted. She’d been trying for ages, practicing in secret with her mother. They’d even been interrupted one morning when Pierre had come up to the living room without them being aware of his arrival, but she’d never yet managed it. Still, she knew that this was indeed a very special moment, and so she tried again with all her might.

The sound was raw, like the tearing of coarse paper, more aspirated breath than anything else. But it was also unmistakable, at least to someone who had longed to hear it. “I love you,” Amanda said, looking at her daddy. Pierre thought something in French, but then, smiling at his wife and hugging her close, reformulated the same thought in English.

Life, thought Pierre Tardivel, doesn’t get any better than this.

Epilogue

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.

— George Bernard Shaw, winner of the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature