He shrugged, making a face like a Leelson face. Physically, he was as unlike Leelson as possible, being short and chunky and dark instead of tall, slender, and bright-haired. A man of gold, Leelson. A man of iron, this. In his favor, he had astonishingly alert blue eyes and was also quite young. Younger than Lutha, at any rate.
“Can I see the boy?” he asked.
She pointed. The door between the office room and the sleeping room was open. He went through it with her behind him.
Leely was standing naked before the window scene, which was dialed to forest. His clothes lay as he’d dropped them in the corner. He had decorated the wall near the window with a feces finger painting, an extraordinary impression of the blown trees in the forest scene. He turned toward them with a lovely smile and a lilting laugh.
“Dananana,” he purred. “Dananana.”
“Excuse me,” she murmured to Trompe. “If you’ll give me a moment.”
Trompe nodded expressionlessly.
She was aware of him watching her as she keyed the room-bot, cleaned Leely, and got the clothes back on him. No matter where she put the fasteners, he managed to get his clothes off, little contortionist! And look at the skin of his chest and shoulders, all blotchy from chill. Well, no harm done. The room-bot had the floor and walls cleaned by the time Leely was dressed again.
“That’s my sweet boy,” she murmured, hugging him and putting him down once more, handing him the child-sized paint sticks she’d gone to such trouble to find.
“Dananana,” he said, patting her face with one hand as he threw the sticks across the room with the other. “Dananana.”
“How old is he?” Trompe asked from the doorway. His face showed nothing, but he knew the answer. He was only checking.
She stiffened. “Almost six.” Leely was just past his fifth birthday.
“Big for his age.” Trompe’s voice held no emotion, but she could feel something. Disapproval? Or what? “He must weigh what?”
“He’s heavy for his age. But, as you know, Leelson is tall and muscular, and my family also runs to size, so Leely will probably be a big man.”
Now she knew what he was thinking. How will she cope then? When he’s a big man, what will she do? His mouth opened, then closed again, the words unspoken. Well, at least he learned fast. And what right did he have to disapprove?
“What kind of treatments have you tried?” he asked.
She fought down her annoyance. Even though he’d been briefed, he wanted her to talk about it so he could feel what she felt, find his way into her psyche. Damn all Fastigats! Would he be more help if he understood?
She gritted her teeth and said in a patient voice, “I’m sure you were told, but both Leelson and I had a genome check early in my pregnancy. Both of us are within normal limits. Leely’s pattern differs from ours only within normal limits. Physically, he’s fine.”
“And mentally?”
Had the man no eyes? She kept her voice calm as she answered.
“Well, sometimes he won’t leave his clothes on. He won’t learn to use the potty, though he does like to eliminate outdoors. He has no speech, obviously. And he doesn’t seem to classify. He reacts to each new animal, person, or thing in pretty much the same manner, with curiosity. If one food chip is tasty, he doesn’t assume similar-looking ones are. He regards each thing as unique.”
“Really?”
“Give him a red ball, he’ll learn that it bounces and squeezes. He may treasure it. If he loses it and I give him another red ball, he has to start from scratch. Though it looks identical to me, somehow he knows it isn’t the same thing he had before.”
“Strange.”
She nodded. It was. Strange.
“I understand they’ve tried splicing him.”
It wasn’t a question, but she answered it anyhow. “The geneticists spotted a few rare variations that they thought might be connected to behavior, and they tried substituting some more common alleles. Among Leely’s unique attributes, however, is a super-efficient immune system. Each time extraneous genetic material is introduced, his body kills it. It may take him a day, or a week, but he manages it every time. That means that even if we hit upon whatever variant might help, it would take him a very short time to get rid of it. And, of course, it may not be in the chromosomes. It may be elsewhere in the cells.”