Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  I said none of that. Instead I heard myself saying, coolly and with a calm cruelty, “You’re quite right. You were bought by Devrie, and she is now using her own purchase for her own ends. You’re a piece of equipment bought and paid for. Unfortunately, there’s no money in the account. It has all been a grand sham.”

  Keith jerked me to face him with such violence that my neck cracked. “What are you saying?”

  The words came as smoothly, as plausibly, as if I had rehearsed them. I didn’t even consciously plan them: how can you plan a lie you do not know you will need? I slashed through this forest blind, but the ground held under my feet.

  “Devrie told me that she has signed over most of her inheritance to you. What she didn’t know, because I haven’t yet told her, is that she doesn’t have control of her inheritance any longer. It’s not hers. I control it. I had her declared mentally incompetent on the grounds of violent suicidal tendencies and had myself made her legal guardian. She no longer has the legal right to control her fortune. A doctor observed her when she came to visit me in New York. So the transfer of her fortune to you is invalid.”

  “The lawyers who gave me the papers to sign—”

  “Will learn about the New York action this week,” I said smoothly. How much inheritance law did Keith know?

  Probably very little. Neither did I, and I invented furiously; it only needed to sound plausible. “The New York courts only handed down their decision recently, and Dominican judicial machinery, like everything else in the tropics, moves slowly. But the ruling will hold, Keith. Devrie does not control her own money, and you’re a pauper again. But I have something for you. Here. An airline ticket back to Indian Falls. You’re a free man. Poor, but free. The ticket is in your name, and there’s a check inside it—that’s from me. You’ve earned it, for at least trying to aid poor Devrie. But now you’re going to have to leave her to me. I’m now her legal guardian.

  I held the ticket out to him. It was wrapped in its airline folder; my own name as passenger was hidden. Keith stared at it, and then at me.

  I said softly, “I’m sorry you were cheated. Devrie didn’t mean to. But she has no money, now, to offer you. You can go. Devrie’s my burden now.”

  His voice sounded strangled. “To remove from the Institute?”

  “I never made any secret of wanting her out. Although the legal papers for that will take a little time to filter through the Dominican courts. She wouldn’t go except by force, so force is what I’ll get. Here.”

  I thrust the ticket folder at him. He made no move to take it, and I saw from the hardening of his face—my face, Devrie’s face—the moment when Devrie shifted forests in his mind. Now she was without money, without legal control of her life, about to be tom from the passion she loved most. The helpless underdog. The orphaned woman, poor and cast out, in need of protection from the powerful who had seized her fortune. Not Marx, but Cervantes.

  “You would do that? To your own sister?”

  Anything for a sister. I said bitterly, “Of course I would.”

  “She’s not mentally incompetent!”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “No!”

  I shrugged. “The courts say she is.”

  Keith studied me, resolve hardening around him. I thought of certain shining crystals, that will harden around any stray piece of grit. Now that I was succeeding in convincing him, my lies hurt—or perhaps what hurt was how easily he believed them.

  “Are you sure, Seena,” he said, “that you aren’t just trying a grab for Devrie’s fortune?”

  I shrugged again, and tried to make my voice toneless. “I want her out of here. I don’t want her to die.”

  “Die? What makes you think she would die?”

  “She looks—”

  “She’s nowhere near dying,” Keith said angrily—his anger a release, so much that it hardly mattered at what. “Don’t you think I can tell in twin trance what her exact physical state is? And don’t you know how much control the trance give each twin over the bodily processes of the other? Don’t you even know that? Devrie isn’t anywhere near dying. And I’d pull her out of trance if she were.” He paused, looking hard at me. “Keep your ticket, Seena.”

  I repeated mechanically, “You can leave now. There’s no money.” Devrie had lied to me.

  “That wouldn’t leave her with any protection at all, would it?” he said levelly. When he grasped the door knob to leave, the tendons in his wrist stood out clearly, strong and taut. I did not try to stop his going.

  Devrie had lied to me. With her lie, she had blackmailed me into yet another lie to Keith. The twin trance granted control, in some unspecified way, to each twin’s body; the trance I had pioneered might have resulted in eight deaths unknowingly inflicted on each other out of who knows what dark forests in eight fumbling minds. Lies, blackmail, death, more lies.

  Out of these lies they were going to make scientific truth. Through these forests they were going to search for God.

  “Final clearance check of holotanks,” an assistant said formally. “Faraday cage?”

  “Optimum.”

  “External radiation?”

  “Cleared,” said the man seated at the console of the first tank.

  “Cleared,” said the woman seated at the console of the second.

  “Microradiation?”

  “Cleared.”

  “Cleared.”

  “Personnel radiation, Class A?”

  “Cleared.”

  “Cleared.”

  On it went, the whole tedious and crucial procedure, until both tanks had been cleared and focused, the fluid adjusted, tested, adjusted again, tested again. Bohentin listened patiently, without expression, but I, standing to the side of him and behind the tanks, saw the nerve at the base of his neck and just below the hairline pulse in some irregular rhythm of its own. Each time the nerve pulsed, the skin rose slightly from under his collar. I kept my eyes on that syncopated crawling of flesh, and felt tension prickle over my own skin like heat.

  Three-quarters of the lab, the portion where the holotanks and other machinery stood, was softly dark, lit mostly from the glow of console dials and the indirect track lighting focused on the tanks. Standing in the gloom were Bohentin, five other scientists, two medical doctors—and me. Bohentin had fought my being allowed there, but in the end he had had to give in. I had known too many threatening words not in generalities but in specifics: reporter’s names, drug names, cloning details, twin trance tragedy, anorexia symptoms, bioengineering amendment. He was not a man who much noticed either public opinion or relatives’ threats, but no one else outside his Institute knew so many so specific words—some knew some of the words, but only I had them all. In the end he had focused on me his cold, brilliant eyes, and given permission for me to witness the experiment that involved my sister.

  I was going to hold Devrie to her bargain. I was not going to believe anything she told me without witnessing it for myself.

  Half the morning passed in technical preparation. Somewhere Devrie and Keith, the human components of this costly detection circuit, were separately being brought to the apex of brain activity. Drugs, biofeedback, tactile and auditory and kinaesthetic stimulation—all carefully calculated for the maximum increase of both the number of neurotransmitters firing signals through the synapses of the brain and of the speed at which the signals raced. The more rapid the transmission through certain pathways, the more intense both perception and feeling. Some neurotransmitters, under this pressure, would alter molecular structure into natural hallucinogens; that reaction had to be controlled. Meanwhile other drugs, other biofeedback techniques, would depress the body’s natural enzymes designed to either reabsorb excess transmitters or to reduce the rate at which they fired. The number and speed of neurotransmitters in Keith’s and Devrie’s brains would mount, and mount, and mount, all natural chemical barriers removed. The two of them would enter the lab with their whole brains—rational cortex, emotional lim
bic, right and left brain functions—simultaneously aroused to an unimaginable degree. Simultaneously. They would be feeling as great a “rush” as a falling skydiver, as great a glow as a cocaine user, as great a mental clarity and receptivity as a da Vinci whose brush is guided by all the integrated visions of his unconscious mind. They would be white-hot.

  Then they would hit each other with the twin trance.

  The quarter of the lab which Keith and Devrie would use was softly and indirectly lit, though brighter than the rest. It consisted of a raised, luxuriantly padded platform, walls and textured pillows in a pink whose component wavelengths had been carefully calculated, temperature in a complex gradient producing precise convection flows over the skin. The man and woman in that womb-colored, flesh-stimulating environment would be able to see us observers standing in the gloom behind the holotanks only as vague shapes. When the two doors opened and Devrie and Keith moved onto the platform, I knew that they would not even try to distinguish who stood in the lab. Looking at their faces, that looked only at each other, I felt my heart clutch.

  They were naked except for the soft helmets that both attached hundreds of needles to nerve clumps just below the skin and also held the earphones through which Bohentin controlled the music that swelled the cathedrals of their skulls. “Cathedrals”—from their faces, transfigured to the ravished ecstasy found in paintings of medieval saints, that was the right word. But here the ecstasy was controlled, understood, and I saw with a sudden rush of pain at old memories that I could recognize the exact moment when Keith and Devrie locked onto each other with the twin trance. I recognized it, with my own more bitter hyperclarity, in their eyes, as I recognized the cast of concentration that came over their features, and the intensity of their absorption. The twin trance. They clutched each other’s hands, faces inches apart, and suddenly I had to look away.

  Each holotank held two whorls of shifting colors, the outlines clearer and the textures more sharply delineated than any previous holographs in the history of science. Keith’s and Devrie’s perceptions of each other’s presence. The whorls went on clarifying themselves, separating into distinct and mappable layers, as on the platform Keith and Devrie remained frozen, all their energies focused on the telepathic trance. Seconds passed, and then minutes. And still, despite the clarity of the holographs in the tank, a clarity that fifteen years earlier I would have given my right hand for, I sensed that Keith and Devrie were holding back, were deliberately confining their unimaginable perceptiveness to each other’s radiant energy, in the same way that water is confined behind a dam to build power.

  But how could I be sensing that? From a subliminal “reading” of the mapped perceptions in the holotanks? Or from something else?

  More minutes passed. Keith and Devrie stayed frozen, facing each other, and over her skeletal body and his stronger one a flush began to spread, rosy and slow, like heat tide rising.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” said one of the medical doctors, so low that only I, standing directly behind her, could have heard. It was not a curse, nor a prayer, but some third possibility, unnameable.

  Keith put one hand on Devrie’s thigh. She shuddered. He drew her down to the cushions on the platform and they began to caress each other, not frenzied, not in the exploring way of lovers but with a deliberation I have never experienced outside a research lab, a slow care that implied that worlds of interpretation hung on each movement. Yet the effect was not of coldness nor detachment but of intense involvement, of tremendous energy joyously used, of creating each other’s bodies right then, there under each other’s hands. They were working, and oblivious to all but their work. But if it was a kind of creative work, it was also a kind of primal innocent eroticism, and, watching, I felt my own heat begin to rise. “Innocent”—but if innocence is unknowingness, there was nothing innocent about it at all. Keith and Devrie knew and controlled each heartbeat, and I felt the exact moment, when they let their sexual energies, added to all the other neural energies, burst the dam and flood outward in wave after wave, expanding the scope of each brain’s perceptions, inundating the artificially-walled world.

  A third whorl formed in holotank.

  It formed suddenly: one second nothing, the next brightness. But then it wavered, faded a bit. After a few moments it brightened slightly, a diffused golden haze, before again fading. On the platform Keith gasped, and I guessed he was having to shift his attention between perceiving the third source of radiation and keeping up the erotic version of the twin trance. His biofeedback techniques were less experienced than Devrie’s, and the male erection more fragile. But then he caught the rhythm, and the holograph brightened.

  It seemed to me that the room brightened as well, although no additional lights came on and the consoles glowed no brighter. Sweat poured off the researchers. Bohentin leaned forward, his neck muscle tautening toward the platform as if it were his will and not Keith/Devrie’s that strained to perceive that third presence recorded in the tank. I thought, stupidly, of mythical intermediaries: Merlyn never made king, Moses never reaching the Promised Land. Intermediaries—and then it became impossible to think of anything at all.

  Devrie shuddered and cried out. Keith’s orgasm came a moment later, and with it a final roil of neural activity so strong the two primary whorls in each holotank swelled to fill the tank and inundate the third. At the moment of breakthrough Keith screamed, and in memory it seems as if the scream was what tore through the last curtain—that is nonsense. How loud would microbes have to scream to attract the attention of giants? How loud does a knock on the door have to be to pull a sleeper from the alien world of dreams?

  The doctor beside me fell to her knees. The third presence—or some part of it—swirled all around us, racing along our own unprepared synapses and neurons, and what swirled and raced was astonishment. A golden, majestic astonishment. We had finally attracted Its attention, finally knocked with enough neural force to be just barely heard—and It was astonished that we could, or did exist. The slow rise of that powerful astonishment within the shielded lab was like the slow swinging around of the head of a great beast to regard some butterfly it has barely glimsped from the corner of one eye. But this was no beast. As Its attention swung toward us, pain exploded in my skull—the pain of sound too loud, lights too bright, charge too high. My brain was burning on overload. There came one more flash of insight—wordless, pattern without end—and the sound of screaming. Then, abruptly, the energy vanished.

  Bohentin, on all fours, crawled toward the holotanks. The doctor lay slumped on the floor; the other doctor had already reached the platform and its two crumpled figures. Someone was crying, someone else shouting. I rose, fell, dragged myself to the side of the platform and then could not climb it. I could not climb the platform. Hanging with two hands on the edge, hearing the voice crying as my own, I watched the doctor bend shakily to Keith, roll him off Devrie to bend over her, turn back to Keith.

  Bohentin cried, “The tapes are intact!”

  “Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God,” someone moaned, until abruptly she stopped. I grasped the flesh-colored padding on top of the platform and pulled myself up onto it.

  Devrie lay unconscious, pulse erratic, face cast in perfect bliss. The doctor breathed into Keith’s mouth—what strength could the doctor himself have left?—and pushed on the naked chest. Breathe, push, breathe, push. The whole length of Keith’s body shuddered; the doctor rocked back on his heels; Keith breathed.

  “It’s all on tape!” Bohentin cried. “It’s all on tape!”

  “God damn you to hell,” I whispered to Devrie’s blissful face. “It didn’t even know we were there!”

  Her eyes opened. I had to lean close to hear her answer. “But now . . . we know He. . . is there.”

  She was too weak to smile. I looked away from her, away from that face, out into the tumultuous emptiness of the lab, anywhere.

  They will try again.

  Devrie has been asleep, fed by glucose solutio
n through an IV, for fourteen hours. I sit near her bed, frowned at by the nurse, who can see my expression as I stare at my sister. Somewhere in another bed Keith is sleeping yet again. His rest is more fitful than Devrie’s; she sinks into sleep as into warm water, but he cannot. Like me, he is afraid of drowning.

  An hour ago he came into Devrie’s room and grasped my hand. “How could It—He—It not have been aware that we existed? Not even have known?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “You felt it too, Seena, didn’t you? The others say they could, so you must have too. It . . . created us in some way. No, that’s wrong. How could It create us and not know?”

  I said wearily, “Do we always know what we’ve created?” and Keith glanced at me sharply. But I had not been referring to my father’s work in cloning.

  “Keith. What’s a Thysania Africana?”

  “A what?”

  “Think of us,” I said, “as just one more biological side-effect. One type of being acts, and another type of being comes into existence. Man stages something like the African Horror, and in doing so he creates whole new species of moths and doesn’t even discover they exist until long afterward. If man can do it, why not God? And why should He be any more aware of it than we are?”

  Keith didn’t like that. He scowled at me, and then looked at Devrie’s sleeping face: Devrie’s sleeping bliss.

  “Because she is a fool,” I said savagely, “and so are you. You won’t leave it alone, will you? Having been noticed by It once, you’ll try to be noticed by It again. Even though she promised me otherwise, and even if it kills you both.” Keith looked at me a long time, seeing clearly—finally—the nature of the abyss between us, and its dimensions. But I already knew neither of us could cross. When at last he spoke, his voice held so much compassion that I hated him. “Seena. Seena, love. There’s no more doubt now, don’t you see? Now rational belief is no harder than rational doubt. Why are you so afraid to even believe?”