Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Something else: I was curious. This boy was my brother—nephew? no, brother—as well as the result of my father’s rational mind. Curiosity prickled over me. I rang the bell.

  It was answered by the landlady, who said that Keith was not home, would not be home until late, was “in rehearsal.”

  “Rehearsal?”

  “Over to the college. He’s a student and they’re putting on a play.”

  I said nothing, thinking.

  “I don’t remember the name of the play,” the landlady said. She was a large woman in a faded garment, dress or robe. “But Keith says it’s going to be real good. It starts this weekend.” She laughed. “But you probably already know all that! George, my husband George, he says I’m forever telling people things they already know!”

  “How would I know?”

  She winked at me. “Don’t you think I got eyes? Sister, or cousin? No, let me guess—older sister. Too much alike for cousins.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Not sister!” She clapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes shiny with amusement. “You’re checking up on him, ain’t you? You’re his mother! I should of seen it right off!”

  I turned to negotiate the porch steps.

  “They rehearse in the new building, Mrs. Torellen,” she called after me. “Just ask anybody you see to point you in the right direction.”

  “Thank you,” I said carefully.

  Rehearsal was nearly over. Evidently it was a dress rehearsal; the actors were in period costume and the director did not interrupt. I did not recognize the period or the play. Devrie had been interested in theater; I was not. Quietly I took a seat in the darkened back row and waited for the pretending to end.

  Despite wig and greasepaint, I had no trouble picking out Keith Torellen. He moved like Devrie: quick, light movements, slightly pigeon-toed. He had her height and, given the differences of a male body, her slenderness. Sitting a theater’s length away, I might have been seeing a male Devrie.

  But seen up close, his face was mine.

  Despite the landlady, it was a shock. He came towards me across the theater lobby, from where I had sent for him, and I saw the moment he too struck the resemblance. He stopped dead, and we stared at each other. Take Devrie’s genes, spread them over a face with the greater bone surface, larger features, and coarser skin texture of a man—and the result was my face. Keith had scrubbed off his make-up and removed his wig, exposing brown curly hair the same shade Devrie’s had been. But his face was mine.

  A strange emotion, unnamed and hot, seared through me.

  “Who are you? Who the hell are you?”

  So no one had come from the Institute after all. Not Devrie, not any one.

  “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” he said; it was almost a whisper. “One of my real family?”

  Still gripped by the unexpected force of emotion, still dumb, I said nothing. Keith took one step toward me. Suspicion played over his face—Devrie would not have been suspicious—and vanished, replaced by a slow painful flush of color.

  “You are. You are one. Are you . . . are you my mother?”

  I put out a hand against a stone post. The lobby was all stone and glass. Why were all theater lobbies stone and glass? Architects had so little damn imagination, so little sense of the bizarre.

  “No! I am not your mother!”

  He touched my arm. “Hey, are you okay? You don’t look good. Do you need to sit down?”

  His concern was unexpected, and touching. I thought that he shared Devrie’s genetic personality and that Devrie had always been hypersensitive to the body. But this was not Devrie. His hand on my arm was stronger, firmer, warmer than Devrie’s. I felt giddy, disoriented. This was not Devrie.

  “A mistake,” I said unsteadily. “This was a mistake. I should not have come. I’m sorry. My name is Dr. Seena Konig and I am a . . . relative of yours, but I think this is a mistake. I have your address and I promise that I’ll write about your family, but now I think I should go.” Write some benign lie, leave him in ignorance. This was a mistake.

  But he looked stricken, and his hand tightened on my arm. “You can’t! I’ve been searching for my biological family for two years! You can’t just go!”

  We were beginning to attract attention in the theater lobby. Hurrying students eyed us sideways. I thought irrelevantly how different they looked from the “students” at the Institute, and with that thought regained my composure. This was a student, a boy—“you can’t!” a boyish protest, and boyish panic in his voice—and not the man-Devrie-me he had seemed a foolish moment ago. He was nearly twenty years my junior. I smiled at him and removed his hand from my arm.

  “Is there somewhere we can have coffee?”

  “Yes. Dr. . . .”

  “Seena,” I said. “Call me Seena.”

  Over coffee, I made him talk first. He watched me anxiously over the rim of his cup, as if I might vanish, and I listened to the words behind the words. His adopting family was the kind that hoped to visit the Grand Canyon but not Europe, go to movies but not opera, aspire to college but not to graduate work, buy wilderness equipment but not wilderness. Ordinary people. Not religious, not rich, not unusual. Keith was the only child. He loved them.

  “But at the same time I never really felt I belonged,” he said, and looked away from me. It was the most personal thing he had knowingly revealed, and I saw that he regretted it. Devrie would not have. More private, then, and less trusting. And I sensed in him a grittiness, a tougher awareness of the world’s hardness, than Devrie had ever had—or needed to have. I made my decision. Having disturbed him thus far, I owed him the truth—but not the whole truth.

  “Now you tell me,” Keith said, pushing away his cup. “Who were my parents? Our parents? Are you my sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our parents?”

  “Both are dead. Our father was Dr. Richard Konig. He was a scientist. He—” But Keith had recognized the name. His readings in biology or history must have been more extensive than I would have expected. His eyes widened, and I suddenly wished I had been more oblique.

  “Richard Konig. He’s one of those scientists that were involved in that bioengineering scandal—”

  “How did you learn about that? It’s all over and done with. Years ago.”

  “Journalism class. We studied how the press handled it, especially the sensationalism surrounding the cloning thing twenty years—”

  I saw the moment it hit him. He groped for his coffee cup, clutched the handle, didn’t raise it. It was empty anyway. And then what I said next shocked me as much as anything I have ever done.

  “It was Devrie,” I said, and heard my own vicious pleasure, “Devrie was the one who wanted me to tell you!”

  But of course he didn’t know who Devrie was. He went on staring at me, panic in his young eyes, and I sat frozen. That tone I heard in my own voice when I said “Devrie,” that vicious pleasure that it was she and not I who was hurting him. . .

  “Cloning,” Keith said. “Konig was in trouble for claiming to have done illegal cloning. Of humans.” His voice held so much dread that I fought off my own dread and tried to hold my voice steady to his need.

  “It’s illegal now, but not then. And the public badly misunderstood. All that sensationalism—you were right to use that word, Keith—covered up the fact that there is nothing abnormal about producing a fetus from another diploid cell. In the womb, identical twins—”

  “Am I a clone?”

  “Keith—”

  “Am I a clone?”

  Carefully I studied him. This was not what I had intended, but although the fear was still in his eyes, the panic had gone. And curiosity—Devrie’s curiosity, and her eagerness—they were there as well. This boy would not strike me, nor stalk out of the restaurant, nor go into psychic shock.

  “Yes. You are.”

  He sat quietly, his gaze turned inward. A long moment passed i
n silence.

  “Your cell?”

  “No. My—our sister’s. Our sister Devrie.”

  Another long silence. He did not panic. Then he said softly, “Tell me.”

  Devrie’s phrase.

  “There isn’t much to tell, Keith. If you’ve seen the media accounts, you know the story, and also what was made of it. The issue then becomes how you feel about what you saw. Do you believe that cloning is meddling with things man should best leave alone?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  I let out my breath, although I hadn’t known I’d been holding it. “It’s actually no more than delayed twinning, followed by surrogate implantation. A zygote—”

  “I know all that,” he said with some harshness, and held up his hand to silence me. I didn’t think he knew that he did it. The harshness did not sound like Devrie. To my ears, it sounded like myself. He sat thinking, remote and troubled, and I did not try to touch him.

  Finally he said, “Do my parents know?”

  He meant his adoptive parents. “No.”

  “Why are you telling me now? Why did you come?”

  “Devrie asked me to.”

  “She needs something, right? A kidney? Something like that?”

  I had not foreseen that question. He did not move in a class where spare organs are easily purchasable. “No. Not a kidney, not any kind of biological donation.” A voice in my mind jeered at that, but I was not going to give him any clues that would lead to Devrie. “She just wanted me to find you.”

  “Why didn’t she find me herself? She’s my age, right?”

  “Yes. She’s ill just now and couldn’t come.”

  “Is she dying?”

  “No!”

  Again he sat quietly, finally saying, “No one could tell me anything. For two years I’ve been searching for my mother, and not one of the adoptee-search agencies could find a single trace. Not one. Now I see why. Who covered the trail so well?”

  “My father.”

  “I want to meet Devrie.”

  I said evenly, “That might not be possible.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s in a foreign hospital. Out of the country. I’m sorry.”

  “When does she come home?”

  “No one is sure.”

  “What disease does she have?”

  She’s sick for God, I thought, but aloud I said, not thinking it through, “A brain disease.”

  Instantly, I saw my own cruelty. Keith paled, and I cried, “No, no, nothing you could have as well! Truly, Keith, it’s not—she took a bad fall. From her hunter.”

  “Her hunter,” he said. For the first time, his gaze flickered over my clothing and jewelry. But would he even recognize how expensive they were? I doubted it. He wore a synthetic, deep-pile jacket with a tear at one shoulder and a cheap wool hat, dark blue, shapeless with age. From long experience I recognized his gaze: uneasy, furtive, the expression of a man glimpsing the financial gulf between what he had assumed were equals. But it wouldn’t matter. Adopted children have no legal claim on the estates of their biological parents. I had checked.

  Keith said uneasily, “Do you have a picture of Devrie?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “Why did she want you to find me? You still haven’t said.” I shrugged. “The same reason, I suppose, that you looked for your biological family. The pull of blood.”

  “Then she wants me to write to her.”

  “Write to me instead.”

  He frowned. “Why? Why not to Devrie?”

  What to say to that? I hadn’t bargained on so much intensity from him. “Write in care of me, and I’ll forward it to Devrie.”

  “Why not to her directly?”

  “Her doctors might not think it advisable,” I said coldly, and he backed off—either from the mention of doctors or from the coldness.

  “Then give me your address, Seena. Please.”

  I did. I could see no harm in his writing me. It might even be pleasant. Coming home from the museum, another wintry day among the exhibits, to find on the mailnet a letter I could answer when and how I chose, without being taken by surprise. I liked the idea.

  But no more difficult questions now I stood. “I have to leave, Keith.”

  He looked alarmed. “So soon?”

  “Yes.”

  “But why?”

  “I have to return to work.”

  He stood, too. He was taller than Devrie. “Seena,” he said, all earnestness, “just a few more questions. How did you find me?”

  “Medical connections.”

  “Yours?”

  “Our father’s. I’m not a scientist.” Evidently his journalism class had not studied twin-trance sensationalism.

  “What do you do?”

  “Museum curator. Arthropods.”

  “What does Devrie do?”

  “She’s too ill to work, I must go, Keith.”

  “One more. Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

  “It would be wise, Keith, if you were careful whom you spoke with about all of this. I hadn’t intended to say so much.”

  “I’m not going to tell my parents. Not about being—not about all of it.”

  “I think that’s best, yes.”

  “Do I look like Devrie as well as you?”

  A little of my first, strange emotion returned with his intensity. “A little, yes. But more like me. Sex variance is a tricky thing.”

  Unexpectedly, he held my coat for me. As I slipped into it, he said from behind, “Thank you, Seena,” and let his hands rest on my shoulders.

  I did not turn around. I felt my face flame, and self-disgust flooded through me, followed by a desire to laugh. It was all so transparent. This man was an attractive stranger, was Devrie, was youth, was myself, was the work not of my father’s loins but of his mind. Of course I was aroused by him. Freud outlasts cloning: a note for a research study, I told myself grimly, and inwardly I did laugh.

  But that didn’t help either.

  In New York, winter came early. Cold winds whipped whitecaps on harbor and river, and the trees in the Park stood bare even before October had ended. The crumbling outer boroughs of the shrinking city crumbled a little more and talked of the days when New York had been important. Manhattan battened down for snow, hired the seasonal increases in personal guards, and talked of Albuquerque. Each night museum security hunted up and evicted the drifters trying to sleep behind exhibits, drifters as chilled and pale as the moths under permaplex, and, it seemed to me, as detached from the blood of their own age. All of New York seemed detached to me that October, and cold. Often I stood in front of the cases of Noctuidae, staring at them for so long that my staff began to glance at each other covertly. I would catch their glances when I jerked free of my trance. No one asked me about it.

  Still no message came from Devrie. When I contacted the Institute on the mailnet, she did not call back.

  No letter from Keith Torellen.

  Then one night, after I had worked late and was hurrying through the chilly gloom towards my building, he was there, bulking from the shadows so quickly that the guard I had taken for the walk from the museum sprang forward in attack position.

  “No! It’s all right! I know him!”

  The guard retreated, without expression. Keith stared after him, and then at me, his face unreadable.

  “Keith, what are you doing here? Come inside!”

  He followed me into the lobby without a word. Nor did he say anything during the metal scanning and ID procedure. I took him up to my apartment, studying him in the elevator. He wore the same jacket and cheap wool hat as in Indian Falls, his hair wanted cutting, and the tip of his nose was red from waiting in the cold. How long had he waited there? He badly needed a shave.

  In the apartment he scanned the rugs, the paintings, my grandmother’s ridiculously ornate, ugly silver, and turned his back on them to face me.

  “Seena. I want to know where Devrie is.”

  “Wh
y? Keith, what has happened?”

  “Nothing has happened,” he said, removing his jacket but not laying it anywhere. “Only that I’ve left school and spent two days hitching here. It’s no good, Seena. To say that cloning is just like twinning: it’s no good. I want to see Devrie.”

  His voice was hard. Bulking in my living room, unshaven, that hat pulled down over his ears, he looked older and less malleable than the last time I had seen him. Alarm—not physical fear, I was not afraid of him, but a subtler and deeper fear—sounded through me.

  “Why do you want to see Devrie?”

  “Because she cheated me.”

  “Of what, for God’s sake?”

  “Can I have a drink? Or a smoke?”

  I poured him a Scotch. If he drank, he might talk. I had to know what he wanted, why such a desperate air clung to him, how to keep him from Devrie. I had never seen her like this. She was strong-willed, but always with a blitheness, a trust that eventually her will would prevail. Desperate forcefulness of the sort in Keith’s manner was not her style. But of course Devrie had always had silent money to back her will; perhaps money could buy trust as well as style.

  Keith drank off his Scotch and held out his glass for another. “It was freezing out there. They wouldn’t let me in the lobby to wait for you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You didn’t tell me your family was rich.”

  I was a little taken aback at his bluntness, but at the same time it pleased me; I don’t know why.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “That’s shit, Seena.”

  “Keith. Why are you here?”

  “I told you. I want to see Devrie.”

  “What is it you’ve decided she cheated you of? Money?” He looked so honestly surprised that again I was startled, this time by his resemblance to Devrie. She too would not have thought of financial considerations first, if there were emotional ones possible. One moment Keith was Devrie, one moment he was not. Now he scowled with sudden anger.

  “Is that what you think—that fortune hunting brought me hitching from New Hampshire? God, Seena, I didn’t even know how much you had until this very—I still don’t know!”