I know what people think when they look at me. I feel their eyes slide over me and sense them recoil. I watch them steal glances when they think I don't notice. I watch them whisper and count themselves lucky: there, but for the grace of God, go I. They think, Down's syndrome, but they're wrong. Down's syndrome is trisomy of chromosome 21. I'm something different.

Picture in your mind, if you will, the dance of chromosomes that created the egg that was once half of all I am. Painted with the histologist's palette, they would shine blue as a summer sky. Half of me is there in letters drawn with the light of heaven. Half of my mother, the melding of her mother and father and that thread of heredity that ties me to that first birth, that first becoming, long ago.

See how they clasp each other tightly now as they move, lining up like couples awaiting the commencement of a waltz. Now, on either side of them, two stars explode. Let us paint them in living, vibrant green. Two verdant supernovae reaching with fiery fingers to touch the waiting dancers. Threads woven of a thousand tiny motes of protein, growing and collapsing, ever changing, never still. They reach out as we reach into time, adding individual upon individual, generation onto generation. The teeming webs entangle the dancers now, enmesh them, clasp each of them, tie them into their embrace.

For a moment the melody pauses, and in the breath between beats the dancers bid their partners farewell. Then they are dragged apart, the insistent fingers tearing them from each other's embrace. Twenty-two couples become forty-four individuals in the blind genetic arithmetic. Twenty-two out of twenty-three; forty-four out of forty-six. Two dancers remain clasped like lovers in a desperate embrace, a tiny echo of a thousand tearful partings when love is life and separation death. In the center of the floor they remain, pulled taut in a tug of war, stubborn strands on the life-weaving loom.

And then one thread breaks.

The inseparable pair snap to one side. The fingers draw back and clench. Later - in the forge of love and sex, desire and instinct - twenty-four are added to twenty-three. It is in that miscalculation, in that wrong sum that the possibility of what I am is made certain. No doubt now. Trisomy of chromosome 13. Not Down's syndrome. Something different, something altogether new.

I was born into a clamor of voices. Torn from the warm whispering of the womb and immersed in a torrent of noise. The entire world was a scream. Sound indescribably loud, voices booming like the birth and death of universes, crashing down on me like an unending rain of blows. I withered beneath it, curled up inside myself, and begged for the pain to stop. I cannot convey the terror of it, nor do I want to.

The doctors pronounced that I had Down's syndrome with profound mental retardation, complicated by an atypical alaryngia. A cruel insult added to a devastating injury. Or so it seemed, but I know better. Nature provides.

Those first years, my life was pain. I wonder now how I did not lose myself entirely. Perhaps it was some echo of the stubborn microscopic embrace that made me. Perhaps it was fate. Perhaps I'll never know beyond poetic speculation.

I do know what saved me, though. Somewhere deep inside I found a rock, an unshakeable kernel of myself to shelter behind, to hide from the screaming world. In that barest of respites, I became aware of myself. Aware enough to reach out and find another rock and add it to the first. Over the course of time I piled rock upon rock, building a wall between me and outside, reclaiming my mind from the madness. With every rock the wall grew higher and the screaming fainter, until at last it had shrunk back to a dull roar. So, at the age of five or six, I emerged gasping from the ocean of noise, like the first creature to crawl out of the ocean onto the land, and no less unique.

Secure within my fortress, I looked out at the world into which I'd been born. As for a blind man whose sight is miraculously restored, little at first made sense. The world raged and roared around me, and only slowly did I divine meaning from the babble. The roaring voices resolved themselves into people. Mother - the warm milk of her love tainted with the bitter tang of shame: shame for the flaw within her that made me, her imperfect child. Father - cold like the knife he used to dissect and distill the elements of the world, revulsion glittering along the keen edge he turned on me. Others - family and strangers, all colored with the sundry shades of pity, disgust, and fear.

Why? What was wrong with me?

I reached down into myself and found my voice, the voice that Nature had given me.

"Why are you ashamed of me, Mother? Why? Why?" I asked.

In my mother's wild terrified stare, in her screams as she ran from the room clutching her head, in the flood of fear and disbelief that flowed from her, I first realized that I was different. Quite how different, I could not even grasp at the time, but enough to know my voice was strange and not to be used. I remained silent and watched and learned and grew inside.

I learned to respond to the crude attempts at communication that the others used - gestures and signs. Not as powerful as my own voice, but it seemed to bring them happiness - and they had little enough of that. I learned more of what they thought of me, of how they saw me: crippled, flawed, a broken toy on the nursery floor, a misshapen dream. For a time I tried in the clumsy signs to show them how wrong they were. My mother was overjoyed, my father intrigued in that cold scientific way of his. Mostly, though, they misunderstood - due either to my clumsy signs (I had not yet fully mastered my body at that time) or to the fog of their prejudice, which would not let them see truly what was before their eyes.

I noticed they misunderstood many things, did not see many things, did not hear or did not listen to each other. This was puzzling to me. I could hear my mother pleading with my father to show me, show her, show us more love - yet he ignored it. No - not even ignored it, he seemed not to even hear it. Was he deaf? Was his hate so great?

Then one day, I discovered the truth in a lie.

Picture a sunny suburban garden in high summer, the air brimming with life, the grass a verdant blaze under the touch of the hot sun. Golden light, sun-dappled shade, and myself, a small child, drunk with joy at the new strength flowing into my limbs. Running across the soft grass, across the hot flagstones of the patio, fragrant with the scent of bay trees, lovingly pruned and shaped, standing in terra-cotta pots. A stumble, a trip, an accident. Orange pot-shards scattered across grey stones. I stand transfixed over it. Mother comes running from the house.

"Mikey! What's happened? Are you all right? Oh I hope you're not hurt. Please don't be hurt, my poor baby."

I stand and look at her. Her eyes fall upon the fallen tree, the shattered pot. Her face reddens, and anger replaces concern.

"He broke my pot! Did you break the pot, Mikey?"

"No! Dog break!"

The lie is reflexive, coming to my signing fingers from that wellspring of the self, that some men call original sin - as blatant as the broken shards at my feet. I am transparent before her as she is to me, certain to be seen through.

But I am not. Mother scowls at the Labrador beside me wagging its tail plaintively.

"That bloody dog! I don't know why John insists on keeping the stupid thing. Bad dog! Come on, Mikey. Come inside and mummy will tidy up this mess later. I'm sorry I was mad at you."

That was when I fully realized how different I was. That others could not look through me as I looked though them. They had two voices, but could only hear one. I had one, but could hear two. My voice was not like theirs. It was strange and frightened them, because they were not used to hearing any other voice inside their heads but their own. I could look into their hearts, into their minds, and see their real selves cowering inside.

That evening, when my father came home, his head full of experiments and sharp-bladed logic, a cold sweat washed over me. If he or the knife-minded men like him discovered my voice, my gift, my difference, they would dissect me the way my father dissected the rats in his head every night when he slept. Open me up to find where my voice came from. Open me up, hollow me out. Fear me because I knew their secrets. Hate me because I was not like them. Destroy me because I was different. I knew enough at that age to know that the others destroyed each other because they hate what is different.

That night, as I lay shaking in my bed in terror of the knife-minded men, I knew that I could never tell anyone what I was. I would appear to be what they wanted me to be. I would appear to be the same as them. I would quietly learn about the world, learning by looking inside their minds, listening to their inner voices, rifling their minds for knowledge like a burglar in a library. Maybe, if I learned enough, I would find a way to live without fear. Maybe I could find a way to make them understand.

And that's what I've done. I've spent everyday since then learning. Learning about how savage and stupid the others can be. How much pain their inability to understand each other causes, how much hate. I've learned how imperfect and damaged they are, how lonely and alone. I've learned to hate them, pity them, be repulsed by them, be ashamed of them. Yet I love them, because they cannot help the way they are. They are born that way, just as I was.

No - I'm not Down's syndrome. I'm something different. Something new. I'm the shape of things to -

The pager flashed on the desk beside him. He picked it up and squinted at the message in the dim light from the laptop screen.

<Doctor Matthews to Ward 23>.

With a sigh, Dr. Matthews saved up the short story and closed the machine. Stepping out of the office, he gazed at the row of five beds lining either side of the ward, each holding a sleeping Down's syndrome child.

"Shame it's not true," he whispered.

Dr. Matthews turned on his heel and set off down the corridor. As one, in the ward behind him, ten children smiled angelically in the darkness.