Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  The mail came, and with it a story to illustrate for a fanzine called Googolplex. It was a low-paying, no-prestige market, but Googolplex had published Kenny’s first sketch and he regarded drawing for it as a sentimental noblesse oblige. He made himself a cup of coffee, and settled in to read the story, which turned out to be awful.

  The title was “Kalja of the Far Seas.” The story took place on a barbaric Earth a thousand years into the future and concerned the exploits of Kalja, a barbarian warrior-queen who had the help of telepathic plants in defending her tribe, her title, and her unspecified number of seas (Kenny never did learn what they were far from). The telepathic plants thought in Cockney.

  Groaning, Kenny got out paper and pencil and began to sketch. Something rough, not too time-consuming. It was the sort of predictable sketch he could do with his eyes closed. As he worked, however, he began to get interested. Kalja took form in his mind, then under his pencil. Oh, she was magnificent! Not sweet, like the post-holocaust girl. This one was ice cold, a splendid bitch. Black hair, slanting cheekbones, challenging green eyes—it was a black-and-white sketch, but Kenny knew they were green. Deadly. She wore a leather shift that left bare her long legs, which were spread apart and braced aggressively on the earth (grass? rock? fungi?—he would figure it out).

  Beside Kalja, Kenny sketched the vague outline of a forest, a few adoring male underlings, and a thoughtful-looking plant. In the sky he drew the Big Dipper, slightly flattened into the configuration it would have in a thousand years, to let the cognoscenti know how much time had passed (he looked up the configuration in the Encyclopedia Britannica). When he was done, Kalja stared at him icily. Oh, to live a thousand years from now!

  Carefully he wrapped the drawing for mailing, wrote a brief note to the editor, and sealed the package. Tomorrow he would mail it.

  He felt hungry. He ate a sandwich, surprised to see that it was past dinner time. Joanne hadn’t come home. Was she having dinner with a friend tonight? Must be.

  Idly, he wandered to the living room and poked at the plastic bag he had given Carl with the drawing of the young postholocaust girl. He slid out the picture, and he froze.

  It had happened.

  The picture’s background remained the same: rocks, beach, stunted tree. But the girl did not. A few hours in his apartment—not Carl’s!—and she was entirely different. Her face was young, and not young. Youth lay in the curve of cheek, still half baby fat, and the firm little chin. But the eyes were old with misery. Her breasts drooped, shapeless dugs, and the rough brown cloth around her hips did not conceal the bulge of pregnancy. Her hair—that magnificent hair!—hung in dull greasy ropes, and the girl gazed not laughingly at an unseen lover but hopelesly at the horizon, where no ship sailed.

  Kenny moaned. Then he remembered that this story had been set only two hundred years in the future. For a moment he sat numb, before leaping up and running to the package with the picture of Kalja, eight hundred years later still. His fingers refused to tear the envelope. Frantically he searched for a knife, slit the package, and pulled out his sketch of the warrior-queen.

  The paper was blank.

  No, not blank. The vague outline of a forest was there, and the male underlings, and the flattened Big Dipper, and even the plant. But the woman was gone. Not changed into something else, something more real, as the others had been. Just gone.

  Kenny grabbed the phone. His hand shook as he dialed Carl’s number.

  “Carl! They’re gone!”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s me, Kenny! Listen, they’re gone! All the women—they’re going to leave!”

  “What women? Hey, Buddy, calm down. What are you talking about?”

  “The women, the women! They’re all going to leave, Carl!”

  “Women? You mean, like Joanne? Joanne is leaving you?”

  “Joanne? No, listen, Carl—get this straight. Sometime in the future, something between two hundred and a thousand years from now, all the women are going to leave the planet entirely. The men will still be here, but the women will all leave somehow, just take off and go, and all that’ll be left is blank paper!”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then Carl’s voice saying warily, “Kenny . . . hey, Buddy . . . Kenny . . .”

  “Oh, I know I told it badly, you don’t know what’s been going on here, but they are going to leave, I know it, all the pictures have been changing and if—the editor turned down the painting for the Barbizon story and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life drawing small-town Main Streets, but it isn’t even that, it’s the not knowing—”

  “Look, I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t do any ting, anything at all—Kenny? Is Joanne there?”

  “—not knowing why. Why should they go? What could they want that they don’t have here? What?”

  “Is Joanne there?” Carl said, speaking very slowly and clearly, as if to a sick child. “Where’s Joanne?”

  “Joanne? Out somewhere. Carl, have you been listening? They’re going to go, and I can’t figure out where, or why. That’s the thing—why. There’s no reason.”

  “Twenty minutes, Kenny. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Just sit tight, Buddy.”

  “What will I draw?” Kenny said, and hung up the phone. Outside the apartment it grew dark. Kenny sat cross-legged on the floor, holding the blank paper where Kalja of the Far Seas had been. His panic began to turn to anger, then to loss. Loss—he would have to draw small-town Main Streets. And eventually no one would draw bitch-queens or sweet young loves or girls menaced by monsters. Not only him—no one, once the models for all those wonderful fantasy nudes had all left! No one! And for no reason!

  Anger began again to take over. (No one. And for no reason.) Kenny sat muttering. Outside it grew darker. Joanne did not come home.

  “No reason at all,” Kenny said.

  TRINITY

  Nancy Kress’ most recent appearance in these pages was with “Night Win” in the September 1983 issue. Her novel, The Golden Grove, based on the Greek myth of Arachne, was recently published by Bluejay Books, and another, The White Pipes, is due out early in 1985.

  “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!”

  —Mark 9:24

  At first I didn’t recognize Devrie.

  Devrie—I didn’t recognize Devrie. Astonished at myself, I studied the wasted figure standing in the middle of the bare reception room: arms like wires, clavicle sharply outlined, head shaved, dressed in that ugly long tent of light-weight gray. God knew what her legs looked like under it. Then she smiled, and it was Devrie.

  “You look like shit.”

  “Hello. Seena. Come on in.”

  “I am in.”

  “Barely. It’s not catching, you know.”

  “Stupidity fortunately isn’t,” I said and closed the door behind me. The small room was too hot; Devrie would need the heat, of course, with almost no fat left to insulate her bones and organs. Next to her I felt huge, although I am not. Huge, hairy, sloppy-breasted.

  “Thank you for not wearing bright colors. They do affect me.

  “Anything for a sister,” I said, mocking the childhood formula, the old sentiment. But Devrie was too quick to think it was only mockery; in that, at least, she had not changed. She clutched my arm and her fingers felt like chains, or talons. “You found him. Seena, you found him.”

  “I found him.”

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  “Sit down first, before you fall over. God, Devrie, don’t you eat at all?”

  “Tell me,” she said. So I did.

  Devrie Caroline Konig had admitted herself to the Institute of the Biological Hope on the Caribbean island of Dominica eleven months ago, in Late November of 2017, when her age was 23 years and 4 months. I am precise about this because it is all I can be sure of. I need the precision. The Institute of the Biological Hope is not precise; it is a mongrel, part research laboratory in brain sciences, part monastery, part sc
hool for training in the discipline of the mind. That made my baby sister guinea pig, postulant, freshman. She had always been those things, but, until now, sequentially. Apparently so had many other people, for when eccentric Nobel Prize winner James Arthur Bohentin had founded his Institute, he had been able to fund it, although precariously. But in that it did not differ from most private scientific research centers.

  Or most monasteries.

  I wanted Devrie out of the Institute of Biological Hope. “It’s located on Dominica,” I had said sensibly—what an ass I had been—to an unwasted Devrie a year ago, “because the research procedures there fall outside United States laws concerning the safety of research subjects. Doesn’t that tell you something, Devrie? Doesn’t that at least give you pause? In New York, it would be illegal to do to anyone what Bohentin does to his people.”

  “Do you know him?” she had asked.

  “I have met him. Once.”

  “What is he like?”

  “Like stone.”

  Devrie shrugged, and smiled. “All the particpants in the Institute are willing. Eager.”

  “That doesn’t make it ethical for Bohentin to destroy them. Ethical or legal.”

  “It’s legal on Dominica. And in thinking you know better than the participants what they should risk their own lives for, aren’t you playing God?”

  “Better me than some untrained fanatic who offers himself up like an exalted Viking hero, expecting Valhalla.”

  “You’re an intellectual snob Seena.”

  “I never denied it.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t really objecting not to the Institute’s dangers but to its purpose? Isn’t the ‘Hope’ part what really bothers you?”

  “I don’t think scientific method and pseudo-religious mush mix, no. I never did. I don’t think it leads to a perception of God.”

  “The holotank tapes indicate it leads to a perception of something the brain hasn’t encountered before,” Devrie said, and for a moment I was silent.

  I was once, almost, a biologist. I was aware of the legitimate studies that formed the basis for Bohentin’s megalomania: the brain wave changes that accompany anorexia nervosa, sensory deprivation, biological feedback, and neurotransmitter stimulants. I have read the historical accounts, some merely pathetic but some disturbingly not, of the Christian mystics who achieved rapture through the mortification of the flesh and the Eastern mystics who achieved anesthesia through the control of the mind, of the faith healers who succeeded, of the carcinomas shrunk through trained will. I knew of the research of focused clairvoyance during orgasm, and of what happens when neurotransmitter number and speed are increased chemically.

  And I knew all that was known about the twin trance. Fifteen years earlier, as a doctoral student in biology, I had spent one summer replicating Sunderwirth’s pioneering study of drug-enhanced telepathy in identical twins. My results were positive, except that within six months all eight of my research subjects had died. So had Sunderwirth’s. Twin-trance research became the cloning controversy of the new decade, with the same panicky cycle of public outcry, legal restrictions, religious misunderstandings, fear, and demagoguery. When I received the phone call that the last of my subjects was dead—cardiac arrest, no history of heart disease, forty-three God-damn years old—I locked myself in my apartment, with the lights off and my father’s papers clutched in my hand, for three days. Then I resigned from the neurology department and became an entomologist. There is no pain in classifying dead insects.

  “There is something there,” Devrie had repeated. She was holding the letter sent to our father, whom someone at the Institute had not heard was dead. “It says the holotank tapes—”

  “So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’ ?”

  “Why not call it God?”

  “Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

  “But neither do I know that it is.”

  “Devrie—”

  She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study . . . faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith . . .”

  She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pinprick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

  A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

  “He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

  “Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need . . . a minute.” She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

  Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

  “Very impressive,” I said sourly.

  “Seena—have you seen him?”

  “No. All this is from sealed records.”

  “How did you get into the records?”

  “Medical and governmental friends.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

  She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.

  “How old is he now?”

  “Twenty-four years last month. They must have used your two-month tissue sample.”

  “Do you think Daddy knew where the . . . baby went?”

  “Yes. Look at the timing—the child was normal and healthy, yet he wasn’t adopted until he was nearly three. The researchers kept track of him, all right, they kept all six clones in a government-controlled home where they could monitor their development as long as humanely possible. The same-sex clones were released for adoption after a year, but they hung onto the cross-sex ones until they reached an age where they would become harder to adopt. They undoubtedly wanted to study them as long as they could. And even after the kids were released for adoption, the researchers held off publishing until April, 1998, remember. By the time the storm broke, the babies were out of its path, and anonymous.”

  “And the last,” Devrie said.

  “And the last,” I agreed, although of course the researchers hadn’t foreseen that. So few in the scientific community had foreseen that. Offense against God an
d man, Satan’s work, natter natter. Watching my father’s suddenly stooped shoulders and stricken eyes, I had thought how ugly public revulsion could be and had nobly resolved—how had I thought of it then? So long ago—resolved to snatch the banner of pure science from my fallen father’s hand. Another time that I had been an ass. Five years later, when it had been my turn to feel the ugly scorching of public revulsion, I had broken, left neurological research, and fled down the road that led to the Museum of Natural History, where I was the curator of ants fossilized in amber and moths pinned securely under perma-plex.

  “The other four clones,” Devrie said, “the ones from that university in California that published almost simultaneously with Daddy—”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even try to ask. It was hard enough in Cambridge.”

  “Me,” Devrie said wonderingly. “He’s me.”

  “Oh, for—Devrie, he’s your twin. No more than that. No—actually less than that. He shares your genetic material exactly as an identical twin would, except for the Y chromosome, but he shares none of the congenital or environmental influences that shaped your personality. There’s no mystical replication of spirit in cloning. He’s merely a twin who got born eleven months late!”

  She looked at me with luminous amusement. I didn’t like the look. On that fleshless face, the skin stretched so taut that the delicate bones beneath were as visible as the veins of a moth wing, her amusement looked ironic. Yet Devrie was never ironic. Gentle, passionate, trusting, a little stupid, she was not capable of irony. It was beyond her, just as it was beyond her to wonder why I, who had fought her entering the Institute of the Biological Hope, had brought her this information now. Her amusement was one-layered, and trusting. God’s fools, the Middle Ages had called them.

  “Devrie,” I said, and heard my own voice unexpectedly break, “leave here. It’s physically not safe. What are you down to, ten percent body fat? Eight? Look at yourself, you can’t hold body heat, your palms are dry, you can’t move quickly without getting dizzy. Hypotension. What’s your heartbeat? Do you still menstruate? It’s insane.”