Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  She went on smiling at me. God’s fools don’t need menstruation. “Come with me, Seena. I want to show you the Institute.”

  “I don’t want to see it.”

  “Yes. This visit you should see it.”

  “Why this visit?”

  “Because you are going to help me get my clone to come here, aren’t you? Or else why did you go to all the trouble of locating him?”

  I didn’t answer. She still didn’t see it.

  Devrie said, “ ‘Anything for a sister.’ But you were always more like a mother to me than a sister.” She took my hand and pulled herself off the floor. So had I pulled her up to take her first steps, the day after our mother died in a plane crash at Orly. Now Devrie’s hand felt cold. I imprisoned it and counted the pulse.

  “Bradycardia.”

  But she wasn’t listening.

  The Institute was a shock. I had anticipated the laboratories: monotonous gray walls, dim light, heavy soundproofing, minimal fixtures in the ones used for sensory dampening; high-contrast textures and colors, strobe lights, quite good sound equipment in those for sensory arousal. There was much that Devrie, as subject rather than researcher, didn’t have authority to show me, but I deduced much from what I did see. The dormitories, divided by sex, were on the sensory-dampening side. The subjects slept in small cells, ascetic and chaste, that reminded me of an abandoned Carmelite convent I had once toured in Belgium. That was the shock: the physical plant felt scientific, but the atmosphere did not.

  There hung in the gray corridors a wordless peace, a feeling so palpable I could feel it clogging my lungs. No. “Peace” was the wrong word. Say “peace” and the picture is pastoral, lazy sunshine and dreaming woods. This was not like that at all. The research subjects—students? postulants?—lounged in the corridors outside closed labs, waiting for the next step in their routine. Both men and women were anorectic, both wore gray bodysuits or caftans, both were fined down to an otherworldly ethereality when seen from a distance and a malnourished asexuality when seen up close. They talked among themselves in low voices, sitting with backs against the wall or stretched full-length on the carpeted floor, and on all their faces I saw the same luminous patience, the same certainty of being very near to something exciting that they nonetheless could wait for calmly, as long as necessary.

  “They look,” I said to Devrie, “as if they’re waiting to take an exam they already know they’ll ace.”

  She smiled. “Do you think so? I always think of us as travelers waiting for a plane, boarding passes stamped for Eternity.”

  She was actually serious. But she didn’t in fact wear the same expression as the others; hers was far more intense. If they were travelers, she wanted to pilot.

  The lab door opened and the students brought themselves to their feet. Despite their languid movements, they looked sharp: sharp protruding clavicles, bony chins, angular unpadded elbows that could chisel stone.

  “This is my hour for biofeedback manipulation of drug effects,” Devrie said. “Please come watch.”

  “I’d sooner watch you whip yourself in a twelfth-century monastery.”

  Devrie’s eye widened, then again lightened with that luminous amusement. “It’s for the same end, isn’t it? But they had such unsystematic means. Poor struggling God-searchers. I wonder how many of them made it.”

  I wanted to strike her. “Devrie—”

  “If not biofeedback, what would you like to see?”

  “You out of here.”

  “What else?”

  There was only one thing: the holotanks. I struggled with the temptation, and lost. The two tanks stood in the middle of a roomy lab carpeted with thick gray matting and completely enclosed in a Faraday cage. That Devrie had a key to the lab was my first clue that my errand for her had been known, and discussed, by someone higher in the Institute. Research subjects do not carry keys to the most delicate brain-perception equipment in the world. For this equipment Bohentin had received his Nobel.

  The two tanks, independent systems, stood as high as my shoulder. The ones I had used fifteen years ago had been smaller. Each of these was a cube, opaque on its bottom half, which held the sensing apparatus, computerized simulators, and recording equipment; clear on its top half, which was filled with the transparent fluid out of whose molecules the simulations would form. A separate sim would form for each subject, as the machine sorted and mapped all the electromagnetic radiation received and processed by each brain. All that each brain perceived, not only the visuals; the holograph equipment was capable of picking up all wavelengths that the brain did, and of displaying their brain-processed analogues as three-dimensional images floating in a clear womb. When all other possible sources of radiation were filtered out except for the emanations from the two subjects themselves, what the sims showed was what kinds of activity were coming from—and hence going on in—the other’s brain. That was why it worked best with identical twins in twin trance: no structural brain differences to adjust for. In a rawer version of this holotank, a rawer version of myself had pioneered the recording of twin trances. The UCIC, we had called it then: What you see, I see.

  What I had seen was eight autopsy reports.

  “We’re so close,” Devrie said. “Mona and Marlene—” she waved a hand toward the corridor, but Mona and Marlene, whichever two they had been, had gone—“had taken KX3, that’s the drug that—”

  “I know what it is,” I said, too harshly. KX3 reacts with one of the hormones overproduced in an anorectic body. The combination is readily absorbed by body fat, but in a body without fat, much of it is absorbed by the brain.

  Devrie continued, her hand tight on my arm. “Mona and Marlene were controlling the neural reactions with biofeedback, pushing the twin trance higher and higher, working it. Dr. Bohentin was monitoring the holotanks. The sims were incredibly detailed—everything each twin perceived in the perceptions of the other, in all wavelengths. Mona and Marlene forced their neurotransmission level even higher and then, in the tanks—” Devrie’s face glowed, the mystic-rapture look—“a completely third sim formed. Completely separate. A third presence I stared at her.

  “It was recorded in both tanks. It was shadowy, yes, but it was there. A third presence that can’t be perceived except through another human’s electromagnetic presence, and then only with every drug and trained reaction and arousal mode and the twin trance all pushing the brain into a supraheightened state. A third presence!”

  “Isotropic radiation. Bohentin fluffed the pre-screening program and the computer hadn’t cleared the background microradiation—” I said, but even as I spoke I knew how stupid that was. Bohentin didn’t make mistakes like that, and isotropic radiation simulates nowhere close to the way a presence does. Devrie didn’t even bother to answer me.

  This, then, was what the rumors had been about, the rumors leaking for the last year out of the Institute and through the scientific community, mostly still scoffed at, not yet picked up by the popular press. This. A verifiable, replicable third presence being picked up by holography. Against all reason, a long shiver went over me from neck to that cold place at the base of the spine.

  “There’s more,” Devrie said feverishly. “They felt it. Mona and Marlene. Both said afterwards that they could feel it, a huge presence filled with light, but they couldn’t quite reach it. Damn—they couldn’t reach it, Seena! They weren’t playing off each other enough, weren’t close enough. Weren’t, despite the twin trance, melded enough.”

  “Sex,” I said.

  “They tried it. The subjects are all basically heterosexual. They inhibit.”

  “So go find some homosexual God-yearning anorectic incestuous twins!”

  Devrie looked at me straight. “I need him. Here. He is me.”

  I exploded, right there in the holotank lab. No one came running in to find out if the shouting was dangerous to the tanks, which was my second clue that the Institute knew very well why Devrie had brought me there. “Damn it t
o hell, he’s a human being, not some chemical you can just order up because you need it for an experiment! You don’t have the right to expect him to come here, you didn’t even have the right to tell anyone that he exists, but that didn’t stop you, did it? There are still anti-bioengineering groups out there in the real world, religious split-brains who—how dare you put him in any danger? How dare you even presume he’d be interested in this insane mush?”

  “He’ll come,” Devrie said. She had not changed expression.

  “How the hell do you know?”

  “He’s me. And I want God. He will, too.”

  I scowled at her. A fragment of one of her poems, a thing she had written when she was fifteen, came to me: “Two human species/Never one—/One aching for God/One never.” But she had been fifteen then. I had assumed that the sentiment, as adolescent as the poetry, would pass.

  I said, “What does Bohentin think of this idea of importing your clone?”

  For the first time she hesitated. Bohentin, then, was dubious. “He thinks it’s rather a long shot.”

  “You could phrase it that way.”

  “But I know he’ll want to come. Some things you just know, Seena, beyond rationality. And besides—” she hesitated again, and then went on, “I have left half my inheritance from Daddy, and the income on the trust from Mummy.”

  “Devrie. God, Devrie—you’d buy him?”

  For the first time she looked angry. “The money would be just to get him here, to see what is involved. Once he sees, he’ll want this as much as I do, at any price! What price can you put on God? I’m not ‘buying’ his life—I’m offering him the way to find life. What good is breathing, existing, if there’s no purpose to it? Don’t you realize how many centuries, in how many ways, people have looked for that light-filled presence and never been able to be sure? And now we’re almost there, Seena, I’ve seen it for myself—almost there. With verifiable, scientifically-controlled means. Not subjective faith this time—scientific data, the same as for any other actual phenomenon. This research stands now where research into the atom stood fifty years ago. Can you touch a quark? But it’s there! And my clone can be a part of it, can be it, how can you talk about the money buying him under circumstances like that!”

  I said slowly, “How do you know that whatever you’re so close to is God?” But that was sophomoric, of course, and she was ready for it. She smiled warmly.

  “What does it matter what we call it? Pick another label if it will make you more comfortable.”

  I took a piece of paper from my pocket. “His name is Keith Torellen. He lives in Indian Falls, New Hampshire. Address and mailnet number here. Good luck, Devrie.” I turned to go.

  “Seena! I can’t go!”

  She couldn’t, of course. That was the point. She barely had the strength in that starved, drug-battered body to get through the day, let alone to New Hampshire. She needed the sensory-controlled environment, the artificial heat, the chemical monitoring. “Then send someone from the Institute. Perhaps Bohentin will go.”

  “Bohentin!” she said, and I knew that was impossible; Bohentin had to remain officially ignorant of this sort of recruiting. Too many U.S. laws were involved. In addition, Bohentin had no persuasive skills; people as persons and not neurologies did not interest him. They were too far above chemicals and too far below God.

  Devrie looked at me with a kind of level fury. “This is really why you found him, isn’t it? So I would have to stop the drug program long enough to leave here and go get him. You think that once I’ve gone back out into the world either the build-up effects in the brain will be interrupted or else the spell will be broken and I’ll have doubts about coming back here!”

  “Will you listen to yourself? ‘Out in the world.’ You sound like some archaic nun in a cloistered order!”

  “You always did ridicule anything you couldn’t understand,” Devrie said icily, turned her back on me, and stared at the empty holotanks. She didn’t turn when I left the lab, closing the door behind me. She was still facing the tanks, her spiny back rigid, the piece of paper with Keith Torellen’s address clutched in fingers delicate as glass.

  In New York the museum simmered with excitement. An unexpected endowment had enabled us to buy the contents of a small, very old museum located in a part of Madagascar not completely destroyed by the African Horror. Crate after crate of moths began arriving in New York, some of them collected in the days when naturalists-gentlemen shot jungle moths from the trees using dust shot. Some species had been extinct since the Horror and thus were rare; some were the brief mutations from the bad years afterward and thus were even rarer. The museum staff uncrated and exclaimed.

  “Look at this one,” said a young man, holding it out to me. Not on my own staff, he was one of the specialists on loan to us—DeFabio or DeFazio, something like that. He was very handsome. I looked at the moth he showed me, all pale wings outstretched and pinned to black silk. “A perfect Thysania Africana. Perfect.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to loan us the whole exhibit, in a few years.”

  “Yes,” I said again. He heard the tone in my voice and glanced up quickly. But not quickly enough—my face was all professional interest when his gaze reached it. Still, the professional interest had not fooled him; he had heard the perfunctory note. Frowning, he turned back to the moths.

  By day I directed the museum efficiently enough. But in the evenings, home alone in my apartment, I found myself wandering from room to room, touching objects, unable to settle to work at the oversize teak desk that had been my father’s, to the reports and journals that had not. His had dealt with the living, mine with the ancient dead—but I had known that for years. The fogginess of my evenings bothered me.

  “Faith should not mean fogginess.”

  Who had said that? Father, of course, to Devrie, when she had joined the dying Catholic Church. She had been thirteen years old. Skinny, defiant, she had stood clutching a black rosary from God knows where, daring him from scared dark eyes to forbid her. Of course he had not, thinking, I suppose, that Heaven, like any other childhood fever, was best left alone to bum out its course.

  Devrie had been received into the Church in an overdecorated chapel, wearing an overdecorated dress of white lace and carrying a candle. Three years later she had left, dressed in a magenta body suit and holding the keys to Father’s safe, which his executor had left unlocked after the funeral. The will had, of course, made me Devrie’s guardian. In the three years Devrie had been going to Mass, I had discovered that I was sterile, divorced my second husband, finished my work in entomology, accepted my first position with a museum, and entered a drastically premature menopause.

  That is not a flip nor random list.

  After the funeral, I sat in the dark in my father’s study, in his maroon leather chair and at his teak desk. Both felt oversize. All the lights were off. Outside it rained; I heard the steady beat of water on the window, and the wind. The dark room was cold. In my palm I held one of my father’s research awards, a small abstract sculpture of a double helix, done by Harold Landau himself. It was very heavy. I couldn’t think what Landau had used, to make it so heavy. I couldn’t think, with all the noise from the rain. My father was dead, and I would never bear a child.

  Devrie came into the room, leaving the lights off but bringing with her an incandescent rectangle from the doorway. At sixteen she was lovely, with long brown hair in the masses of curls again newly fashionable. She sat on a low stool beside me, all that hair falling around her, her face white in the gloom. She had been crying.

  “He’s gone. He’s really gone. I don’t believe it yet.”

  “No.”

  She peered at me. Something in my face, or my voice, must have alerted her; when she spoke again it was in that voice people use when they think your grief is understandably greater than theirs. A smooth dark voice, like a wave.

  “You still have me, Seena. We still have each other.”
/>   I said nothing.

  “I’ve always thought of you more as my mother than my sister, anyway. You took the place of Mother. You’ve been a mother to at least me.”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand. I looked at her face—so young, so pretty—and I wanted to hit her. I didn’t want to be her mother; I wanted to be her. All her choices lay ahead of her, and it seemed to me that self-indulgent night as if mine were finished. I could have struck her.

  “Seena—”

  “Leave me alone! Can’t you ever leave me alone? All my life you’ve been dragging behind me; why don’t you die and finally leave me alone!”

  We make ourselves pay for small sins more than large ones. The more trivial the thrust, the longer we’re haunted by memory of the wound.

  I believe that.

  Indian Falls was out of another time: slow, quiet, safe. The Avis counter at the airport rented not personal guards but cars, and the only shiny store on Main Street sold wilderness equipment. I suspected that the small state college, like the town, traded mostly on trees and trails. That Keith Torellen was trying to take an academic degree here told me more about his adopting family than if I had hired a professional information service.

  The house where he lived was shabby, paint peeling and steps none too sturdy. I climbed them slowly, thinking once again what I wanted to find out.

  Devrie would answer none of my messages on the mailnet. Nor would she accept my phone calls. She was shutting me out, in retaliation for my refusing to fetch Torellen for her. But Devrie would discover that she could not shut me out as easily as that; we were sisters. I wanted to know if she had contacted Torellen herself, or had sent someone from the Institute to do so.

  If neither, then my visit here would be brief and anonymous; I would leave Keith Torellen to his protected ignorance and shabby town. But if he had seen Devrie, I wanted to discover if and what he had agreed to do for her. It might even be possible that he could be of use in convincing Devrie of the stupidity of what she was doing. If he could be used for that, I would use him.