Word: bernard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ruled that the resale pricing methods used by regulators are appropriate, guaranteeing the Bells their costs plus a reasonable rate of return. If the rules are such a great deal for the resellers, "why aren't the Bells competing in each other's territory?" asks AT&T president Betsy Bernard. To be sure, both sides in this argument have valid claims. While it's probably true that the Bells aren't heading for bankruptcy, it's also clear that regulators are assessing the Bells' costs on the assumption of super-efficient communications networks that in most cases...
...Churchill is less interested in the garish colors of melodrama than the shadings of personality. In Salter, the joy of early parenthood turns bitter and abusive when his wife killed herself and he is left with dreams of killing his own son by reproducing him. In the nice Bernard, revelation upends an ordinary life: however hard it is to learn you were adopted, it must be - given the double-time march of science it certainly will be - harder to learn you're a copy, that you're not unique: "Walk round the corner and see yourself you could...
...This is the old evil-twin story, a gene-spliced Genesis, where Cain and Abel are closer than brothers. "You remind me of him," Salter says to the good Bernard, who replies, "I remind me of him. We both hate you." And where Adam, or God, is the villain, for siring an Abel whose goodness tortures Cain. (Perhaps Eve was cloned in the Garden of Eden; otherwise, where did Cain and Abel find their wives?) Salter, I guess, is Adam, and Abraham too, betrayed by the gods to whom he handed over his child - not to be killed...
...Salter, like any liberal villain, has his reasons. As he explains to the first Bernard: "I spared you, though you were this disgusting thing by then; anyone in their right mind would have squashed you; but I remembered what you'd been like at the beginning and I spared you. I didn't want a different one, I wanted that again because you were perfect just like that, and I loved you." To the new, good Bernard, Salter was, by his lights, a good father; he had the chance to dote on his son instead of locking...
...minutes; Churchill creates galaxy-size stories with black-hole prose. In "A Number" she has pared future shock, tomorrow horror, down to the bone - past the bone, really, to the DNA that makes every clone a Bernard, and every Bernard pathetically or tragically different...