Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I said levelly, “Then what is it you’re feeling so cheated of?”

  Now he was rattled. Again that quick, half-furtive scan of my apartment, pausing a millisecond too long at the Caravaggio, subtly lit by its frame. When his gaze returned to mine it was troubled, a little defensive. Ready to justify. Of course I had put him on the defensive deliberately, but the calculation of my trick did not prepare me for the staggering naiveté of his explanation. Once more it was Devrie complete, reducing the impersonal greatness of science to a personal and emotional loss.

  “Ever since I knew that I was adopted, at five or six years old, I wondered about my biological family. Nothing strange in that—I think all adoptees do. I used to make up stories, kid stuff, about how they were really royalty, or lunar colonists, or survivors of the African Horror. Exotic things. I thought especially about my mother, imagining this whole scene of her holding me once before she released me for adoption, crying over me, loving me so much she could barely let me go but had to for some reason. Sentimental shit.” He laughed, trying to make light of what was not, and drank off his Scotch to avoid my gaze.

  “But Devrie—the fact of her—destroyed all that. I never had a mother who hated to give me up. I never had a mother at all. What I had was a cell cut from Devrie’s fingertip or someplace, something discardable, and she doesn’t even know what I look like. But she’s damn well going to.”

  “Why?” I said evenly. “What could you expect to gain from her knowing what you look like?”

  But he didn’t answer me directly. “The first moment I saw you, Seena, in the theater at school, I thought you were my mother.”

  “I know you did.”

  “And you hated the idea. Why?”

  I thought of the child I would never bear, the marriage, like so many other things of sweet promise, gone sour. But self-pity is a fool’s game. “None of your business.”

  “Isn’t it? Didn’t you hate the idea because of the way I was made? Coldly. An experiment. Weren’t you a little bit insulted at being called the mother of a discardable cell from Devrie’s fingertip?”

  “What the hell have you been reading? An experiment—what is any child but an experiment? A random egg, a random sperm. Don’t talk like one of those anti-science religious split-brains!”

  He studied me levelly. Then he said, “Is Devrie religious? Is that why you’re so afraid of her?”

  I got to my feet, and pointed at the sideboard. “Help yourself to another drink if you wish. I want to wash my hands. I’ve been handling specimens all afternoon.” Stupid, clumsy lie—nobody would believe such a lie.

  In the bathroom I leaned against the closed door, shut my eyes, and willed myself to calm. Why should I be so disturbed by the angry lashing-out of a confused boy? I was handy to lash out against; my father, whom Keith was really angry at, was not. It was all so predictable, so earnestly adolescent, that even over the hurting in my chest I smiled. But the smile, which should have reduced Keith’s ranting to the tantrum of a child-there, there, when you grow up you’ll find out that no one really knows who he is—did not diminish Keith. His losses were real—mother, father, natural place in the natural sequence of life and birth. And suddenly, with a clutch at the pit of my stomach, I knew why I had told him all that I had about his origins. It was not from any ethic of fidelity to “the truth.” I had told him he was clone because I, too, had had real losses—research, marriage, motherhood—and Devrie could never have shared them with me. Luminous, mystical Devrie, too occupied with God to be much hurt by man. 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! And Devrie had smiled tolerantly, patted my head, and left me alone, closing the door softly so as not to disturb my grief. My words had not hurt her. I could not hurt her.

  But I could hurt Keith—the other Devrie—and I had. That was why he disturbed me all out of proportion. That was the bond. My face, my pain, my fault.

  Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. But what nonsense. I was not a believer, and the comforts of superstitious absolution could not touch me. What shit. Like all nonbelievers, I stood alone.

  It came to me then that there was something absurd in thinking all this while leaning against a bathroom door. Grimly absurd, but absurd. The toilet as confessional. I ran the cold water, splashed some on my face and left. How long had I left Keith alone in the living room?

  When I returned, he was standing by the mailnet. He had punched in the command to replay my outgoing postal messages, and displayed on the monitor was Devrie’s address at the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “What is it?” Keith said. “A hospital?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “I can find out, Seena. Knowing this much, I can find out. Tell me.”

  Tell me. “Not a hospital. It’s a research laboratory. Devrie is a voluntary subject.”

  “Research on what? I will find out, Seena.”

  “Brain perception.”

  “Perception of what?”

  “Perception of God,” I said, tom among weariness, anger and a sudden gritty exasperation, irritating as sand. Why not just leave him to Devrie’s persuasions, and her to mystic starvation? But I knew I would not. I still, despite all of it, wanted her out of there.

  Keith frowned, “What do you mean, ‘perception of God’ ?”

  I told him. I made it sound as ridiculous as possible, and as dangerous. I described the anorexia, the massive use of largely untested drugs that would have made the Institute illegal in the United States, the skepticism of most of the scientific community, the psychoses and death that had followed twin-trance research fifteen years earlier. Keith did not remember that—he had been eight years old—and I did not tell him that I had been one of the researchers. I did not tell him about he tapes of the shadowy third presence in Bohentin’s holotanks. In every way I could, with every verbal subtlety at my use, I made the Institute sound crackpot, and dangerous, and ugly. As I spoke, I watched Keith’s face, and sometimes it was mine, and sometimes the expression altered it into Devrie’s. I saw bewilderment at her having chosen to enter the Institute, but not what I had hoped to see. Not scorn, not disgust.

  When I had finished, he said, “But why did she think that I might want to enter such a place as a twin subject?”

  I had saved this for last. “Money. She’d buy you.”

  His hand, holding his third Scotch, went rigid. “Buy me.”

  “It’s the most accurate way to put it.”

  “What the hell made her think—” he mastered himself, not without effort. Not all the discussion of bodily risk had affected him as much as this mention of Devrie’s money. He had a poor man’s touchy pride. “She thinks of me as something to be bought.”

  I was carefully quiet.

  “Damn her,” he said. “Damn her.” Then roughly, “And I was actually considering—”

  I caught my breath. “Considering the Institute? After what I’ve just told you? How in hell could you? And you said, I remember, that your background was not religious!”

  “It’s not. But I . . . I’ve wondered.” And in the sudden turn of his head away from me so that I wouldn’t see the sudden rapt hopelessness in his eyes, in the defiant set of shoulders, I read more than in his banal words, and more than he could know. Devrie’s look, Devrie’s wishfulness, feeding on air. The weariness and anger, checked before, flooded me again and I lashed out at him.

  “Then go ahead and fly to Dominica to enter the Institute yourself!”

  He said nothing. But from something—his expression as he stared into his glass, the shifting of his body—I suddenly knew that he could not afford the trip.

  I said, “So you fancy yourself as a believer?”

  “No. A believer manqué.” From the way he said it, I knew that he had said it before, perhaps often, and that the phrase stirred some hidden place in his imagination.

  “
What is wrong with you,” I said, “with people like you, that the human world is not enough?”

  “What is wrong with people like you, that is it?” he said, and this time he laughed and raised his eyebrows in a little mockery that shut me out from this place beyond reason, this glittering escape. I knew then that somehow or other, sometime or other, despite all I had said, Keith would go to Dominica.

  I poured him another Scotch. As deftly as I could, I led the conversation into other, lighter directions. I asked about his childhood. At first stiffly, then more easily as time and Scotch loosened him, he talked about growing up in the Berkshire Hills. He became more light-hearted, and under my interest turned both shrewd and funny, with a keen sense of humor. His thick brown hair fell over his forehead. I laughed with him, and broke out a bottle of good port. He talked about amateur plays he had acted in; his enthusiasm increased as his coherence decreased. Enthusiasm, humor, thick brown hair. I smoothed the hair back from his forehead. Far into the night I pulled the drapes back from the window and we stood together and looked at the lights of the dying city ten stories below. Fog rolled in from the sea. Keith insisted we open the doors and stand on the balcony; he had never smelled fog tinged with the ocean. We smelled the night, and drank some more, and talked, and laughed.

  And then I led him again to the sofa.

  “Seena?” Keith said. He covered my hand, laid upon his thigh, with his own, and turned his head to look at me questioningly. I leaned forward and touched my lips to his, barely in contact, for a long moment. He drew back, and his hand tried to lift mine. I tightened my fingers.

  “Seena, no . . .”

  “Why not?” I put my mouth back on his, very lightly. He had to draw back to answer, and I could feel that he did not want to draw back. Under my lips he frowned slightly; still, despite his drunkenness—so much more than mine—he groped for the word.

  “Incest . . .”

  “No. We two have never shared a womb.”

  He frowned again, under my mouth. I drew back to smile at him, and shifted my hand. “It doesn’t matter any more, Keith. Not in New York. But even if it did—I am not your sister, not really. You said so yourself—remember? Not a family. Just . . . here.”

  “Not family,” he repeated, and I saw in his eyes the second before he closed them the flash of pain, the greed of a young man’s desire, and even the crafty evasions of the good port. Then his arms closed around me.

  He was very strong, and more than a little violent. I guessed from what confusions the violence flowed but still I enjoyed it, that overwhelming rush from that beautiful male-Devrie body. I wanted him to be violent with me, as long as I knew there was not real danger. No real danger, no real brother, no real child. Keith was not my child but Devrie was my child-sister, and I had to stop her from destroying herself, no matter how . . . didn’t I? “The pull of blood.” But this was necessary, was justified . . . was the necessary gamble. For Devrie.

  So I told myself. Then I stopped telling myself anything at all, and surrendered to the warm tides of pleasure.

  But at dawn I woke and thought—with Keith sleeping heavily across me and the sky cold at the window—what the hell am I doing!

  When I came out of the shower, Keith was sitting rigidly against the pillows. Sitting next to him on the very edge of the bed, I pulled a sheet around my nakedness and reached for his hand. He snatched it away.

  “Keith. It’s all right. Truly it is.”

  “You’re my sister.”

  “But nothing will come of it. No child, no repetitions. It’s not all that uncommon, dear heart.”

  “It is where I come from.”

  “Yes. I know. But not here.”

  He didn’t answer, his face troubled.

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  I could feel his need to get away from me; it was almost palpable. Snatching my bodysuit off the floor, I went into the kitchen, which was chilly. The servant would not arrive for another hour. I turned up the heat, pulled on my bodysuit—standing on the cold floor first on one foot and then on the other, like some extinct species of water fowl—and made coffee. Through the handle of one cup I stuck two folded large bills. He came into the kitchen, dressed even to the tom jacket.

  “Coffee.”

  “Thanks.”

  His fingers closed on the handle of the cup, and his eyes widened. Pure, naked shock, uncushioned by any defenses whatsoever: the whole soul, betrayed, pinned in the eyes.

  “Oh God, no, Keith—how can you even think so? It’s for the trip back to Indian Falls! A gift!”

  An endless pause, while we stared at each other. Then he said, very low, “I’m sorry. I should have . . . seen what it’s for.” But his cup trembled in his hand, and a few drops sloshed onto the floor. It was those few drops that undid me, flooding me with shame. Keith had a right to his shock, and to the anguish in his/my/Devrie’s face. She wanted him for her mystic purposes, I for their prevention. Fanatic and saboteur, we were both better defended against each other than Keith, without money nor religion nor years, was against either of us. If I could have seen any other way than the gamble I had taken . . . but I could not. Nonetheless, I was ashamed.

  “Keith. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did we? Why did we?”

  I could have said: we didn’t; I did. But that might have made it worse for him. He was male, and so young.

  Impulsively I blurted, “Don’t go to Dominica!” But of course he was beyond listening to me now. His face closed. He set down the coffee cup and looked at me from eyes much harder than they had been a minute ago. Was he thinking that because of our night together I expected to influence him directly? I was not that young. He could not foresee that I was trying to guess much farther ahead than that, for which I could not blame him. I could not blame him for anything. But I did regret how clumsily I had handled the money. That had been stupid.

  Nonetheless; when he left a few moments later, the handle of the coffee cup was bare. He had taken the money.

  The Madagascar exhibits were complete. They opened to much press interest, and there were both favorable reviews and celebrations. I could not bring myself to feel that it mattered. Ten times a day I went through the deadening exercise of willing an interest that had deserted me, and when I looked at the moths, ashy white wings outstretched forever, I could feel my body recoil in a way I could not name.

  The image of the moths went home with me. One night in November I actually thought I heard wings beating against the window where I had stood with Keith. I yanked open the drapes and then the doors, but of course there was nothing there. For a long time I stared at the nothingness, smelling the fog, before typing yet another message, urgent-priority personal, to Devrie. The mailnet did not bring any answer.

  I contacted the mailnet computer at the college at Indian Falls. My fingers trembled as they typed a request to leave an urgent-priority personal message for a student, Keith Torellen. The mailnet typed back:

  TORELLEN, KEITH ROBERT. 64830016. ON MEDICAL LEAVE OF ABSENCE. TIME OF LEAVE: INDEFINITE. NO FORWARDING MAILNET NUMBER. END.

  The sound came again at the window. Whirling, I scanned the dark glass, but there was nothing there, no moths, no wings, just the lights of the decaying city flung randomly across the blackness and the sound, faint and very far away, of a siren wailing out somebody else’s disaster.

  I shivered. Putting on a sweater and turning up the heat made me no warmer. Then the mail slot chimed softly and I turned in time to see the letter fall from the pneumatic tube from the lobby, the apartment house sticker clearly visible, assuring me that it had been processed and found free of both poison and explosives. Also visible was the envelope’s logo: INSTITUTE OF THE BIOLOGICAL HOPE, all the O’s radiant golden suns. But Devrie never wrote paper mail. She preferred the mailnet.

  The note was from Keith, not Devrie. A short note, scrawled on a tom scrap of paper in nearly indecipherable handwriting. I had s
een Keith’s handwriting in Indian Falls, across his student notebooks; this was a wildly out-of-control version of it, almost psychotic in the variations of spacing and letter formation that signal identity. I guessed that he had written the note under the influence of a drug, or several drugs, his mind racing much faster than he could write. There was neither punctuation nor paragraphing.

  Dear Seena I’m going to do it I have to know my parents are angry but I have to know I have to all the confusion is gone Seena Keith

  There was a word crossed out between “gone” and “Seena,” scratched out with erratic lines of ink. I held the paper up to the light, tilting it this way and that. The crossed-out word was “mother.”

  all the confusion is gone mother Mother.

  Slowly I let out the breath I had not known I was holding. The first emotion was pity, for Keith, even though I had intended this. We had done a job on him, Devrie and I. Mother, sister, self. And when he and Devrie artifically drove upward the number and speed of the neuro-transmitters in the brain, generated the twin trance, and then Keith’s pre-cloning Freudian-still mind reached for Devrie to add sexual energy to all the other brain energies fueling Bohentin’s holotanks—Mother. Sister. Self.

  All was fair in love and war. A voice inside my head jeered: and which is this? But I was ready for the voice. This was both. I didn’t think it would be long before Devrie left the Institute to storm to New York.

  It was nearly another month, in which the snow began to fall and the city to deck itself in the tired gilt fallacies of Christmas. I felt fine. Humming, I catalogued the Madagascar moths, remounting the best specimens in exhibit cases and sealing them under permaplex, where their fragile wings and delicate antennae could lie safe. The mutant strains had the thinnest wings, unnaturally tenuous and up to twenty-five centimeters each, all of pale ivory, as if a ghostly delicacy were the natural evolutionary response to the glowing landscape of nuclear genocide. I catalogued each carefully.