Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  Then he sat with his head in his hands, anxiety battering him in waves, and wondered how he was ever going to tell Haihong.

  He waited another week, working eighteen hours a day, sleeping in his lab on a cot, neglecting the job he was paid to do and cutting off both his technicians and his superiors. The latter decided to indulge him; they all thought he was brilliant. Every few hours Ben picked up the phone to call the FBI, the FDA, the USBP, anyone in the alphabet soup of law enforcement who could have shut it all down. But each time he put down the phone. Not until he had the inhibitor, which no one would have permitted him to cobble together had they known. Let alone permit giving it to Haihong.

  A lot had been known about neurotransmitters for over seventy years, ever since the first classes of antidepressants. Only the link with genetics was new, and in the last five years, that field—Ben’s field—had exploded. He had the fetus’s genome. The genetics were new, but the countermeasures for the manifested behaviors were not. Ben knew enough about brain chemistry and cerebral structures.

  What he hadn’t known enough about was Haihong.

  “An inhibitor,” she said at the end of his long, lurching explanation, and her calm should have alerted him. An eerie, dangerous calm, like the absence of ocean sucked away from the beach just before the tsunami rolls in. He should have recognized it. But he’d been awake for twenty-two hours straight. He was so tired.

  “Yes, an inhibitor,” he echoed. “And it will work.”

  “You’re sure.”

  Nothing like this was ever sure, but he said, “Yes. As sure as I can be.” He tried to put an arm around her but she pushed him away.

  “An inhibitor calibrated to body weight.”

  “Yes. Increasing in direct proportion.”

  “For his entire life.”

  “Yes. I think so. Haihong—”

  “Side effects?” Still that eerie calm.

  Ben ran his hand through his red hair, making it all stand up. “I don’t know. How can I know?” He wanted to be reassuring, but the brain contained a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand or so branches. That was ten-to-the-hundred-trillionth power of possible neural connections. He was pretty sure what neurotransmitters the genemods on the baby would increase production of, and pretty sure he could inhibit it. But the side effects? Anybody’s guess. Even aspirin affected different people differently.

  Haihong said, “A six-month shelf life and a one-week half-life in the body.”

  She echoed his terminology perfectly, still in that quiet, mechanical voice. Ben put out his hand to touch her again, drew it back. “Yes. Haihong, we need to call the FDA, now that I have something to use as an emergency drug, and let them take over the—”

  “Give me the first batch.”

  He did. This was why he’d made it, because he’d known months ago what she had never told him in words. Twenty-one percent.

  He agreed to put off calling the authorities for one more day. “Just give me time to assimilate it all, Ben. A little time. Okay?”

  He’d agreed. It was her life, her child. Not his.

  The next day she’d been gone.

  In the foul public cyberbooth, nine years later, Ben deleted Haihong’s email. Rumors, she’d written, Sichuan quarantine may lift soon. Interred in her remote village, which the most modern of technologies had forced back into the near primitive, she hadn’t even heard the news. The quarantine had always been as much political as anything else, or it wouldn’t have been in force so long. It was to be lifted today and even now, right there in Chengdu from which she must have sent her email, she still seemed oblivious. I cannot do this anymore. I just cannot.

  What exactly did that mean?

  He left his coffee untouched in the filthy booth. Outside, in the fresh air under California’s blue sky, he pulled out his handheld and booked a flight to China.

  Four: Haihong

  She left the People’s Internet Building at dusk. Usually she spent several hours online, as long as she could afford, in an orgy of catching up on news, on the academic world, on anything outside the quarantine. She only had the opportunity every six months.

  This time, she left as soon as she’d emailed Ben, uploading onto him her bi-annual report, her gratitude, her despair. Unfair, of course, but how could it matter? Ben, in California, had everything; he could add a little despair to his riches. To Haihong nothing mattered any longer, nothing except Cixin, the unruly child who did not love her and for whom she’d given her future. A fruitless sacrifice, since Cixin had no future, either. Everything barren, everything a waste.

  She clutched the package in her hand, the precious six-month supply of inhibitor of proteins in the posterior superior parietal lobes. The pills were sewn inside a gift for Cixin, a stuffed toy he was too old for. Ben had not done any further work on the side-effects. Maybe he had no way to measure them, eight thousand miles away from his research subject. Maybe he had lost interest. So Cixin would go on being irritable, restless, underweight, over-stressed. He would—

  Outside, Haihong blinked. The sparse and rotting skeleton left of Chengdu seemed to have gone mad! Gongs sounded, sirens blared, people poured out of the dilapidated buildings, more people than she had known were left in the city. They were shouting something, something about the quarantine . . .

  Starting forward, she didn’t even see the pedicab speeding around the corner, racing along the nearly trafficless street. The driver, a strong and large man, saw her too late. He yelled and braked, but Haihong had already gone flying. Her tiny and malnourished body struck the ground head first. Bleeding from her mouth, unable to feel any of her body below the neck, her last thought was a wordless prayer for her son.

  Five: Cixin

  By afternoon Cixin was exhausted from walking away from the village, up into the mountains. His legs ached and his empty stomach moaned. Worse, he was afraid he was lost.

  He had been careful to follow the path where Mama used to ride her bicycle, and it had led him to their old picnic place. Cixin had stopped and rested there, but the usual calm had not come over him. Should he try to worship, like Auntie did when she bowed in front of her little shrine? Mama said, in the secret language, that worship was nonsense. But nothing Mama said could be trusted. She was a drunk and a whore.

  Cixin swiped a tear from his dusty cheek. It was stupid to cry. And he wasn’t really lost. After the picnic place, the path had become narrower and harder to see, and maybe—maybe—he had lost it, but he was still climbing uphill. Tibet was uphill, at the top of the mountains. He was all right.

  But so thirsty! If he just had some water . . .

  An hour later he came to a stream. It was shallow and muddy, but he lay on his belly and lapped at the water. That helped a little. Cixin staggered up on his aching legs and resumed climbing.

  An hour after that, it began to get dark.

  Now fear took him. He’d been sure he would reach Tibet before nightfall . . . after all, look how far he’d come! There should be monks coming out to greet him, taking him into a warm place with water and beancurd and congee . . . Nothing was right.

  “Stupid monks!” he screamed as loud as he could, but then stopped because what if the monks were on their way to get him and they heard him and turned back? So he yelled, “I didn’t mean it!”

  But still no monks came.

  Darkness fell swiftly. Cixin huddled at the base of a pine tree, arms wrapped around his body and legs drawn up for warmth. It didn’t help. He didn’t want to race around, not on his hurting legs and not in the dark, and yet it was hard to sit still and do nothing. Every noise terrified him—what if a tiger came? Mama said the tigers were all gone from China but Mama was a drunk and a whore.

  Shivering, he eventually slept.

  In the morning the sun returned, warming him, but everything else was even worse. His belly ached more than his legs. Somehow his tongue had swollen so that it seemed to fill his entire dry mouth. Should he go back to the place where t
he water had been? But he didn’t remember how to get there. All the pine trees, all the larches, all the gray boulders, looked the same.

  Cixin whimpered and started climbing. Surely Tibet couldn’t be much farther. There’d been a map of China in the village school he’d attended until his inability to sit still made him leave, and on the map Tibet looked very close to Sichuan. He was almost there.

  The second nightfall found him no longer able to move. He collapsed beside a boulder, too exhausted even to cry. The picture of the dead dog in the road filled his mind, filled his fitful dreams. When he woke, he was covered with small, stinging bites from something. His cry came out as a hoarse, frustrated whimper. The rising sun filled his eyes, blinding him, and he turned away and tried to sit up.

  Then it happened.

  Cixin knew.

  He was lifted out of his body. Thirst and hunger and insect bites vanished. He was not Cixin, and everything—the whole universe—was Cixin. He was woven into the universe, breathed with it, was one with it, and it spoke to him wordlessly and sang to him without music. Everything was him, and he was everything. He was the gray boulder and the yellow sun rising and the rustling pine trees and the hard ground. He was them and he felt them, it, all, and the mountains reverberated with surprise and with his name: Cixin.

  Come.

  Cixin.

  The child sat on the parched ground, expressionless, and was still and calm.

  “Cixin!”

  A sour, familiar taste melting on his tongue, a big hand in his mouth. Then, after a measureless time that was not time, water forced down his throat.

  “Cixin!”

  Cixin blinked. Then he cried out and would have toppled over had not the big man—how big he was! How pale!—steadied him. More water touched Cixin’s lips.

  “Not too much, buddy, not at first,” the big man said, and he spoke the secret language that only Cixin and Mama knew. How could that be? All at once everything on Cixin hurt, his belly and neck and swollen legs and most of all his head. And the big man had red hair standing up all over his head like an attacking rooster. Cixin started to cry.

  The big man lifted him in his arms and put him over his shoulder. Cixin just glimpsed the two other men, one from his village and one a stranger, their faces rigid with something that Cixin didn’t understand. Then he fainted.

  When he came to, he lay on his bed at Auntie’s house. The big man was there, and the stranger, but the village man was not. The big man was saying, very slowly, some words in the secret language to the stranger, and he was repeating them in real words to Auntie. Cixin tried to say something—he didn’t even know what—but only a croak came out.

  Auntie rushed over to him. She had been crying. Auntie never cried, and fear of this made Cixin wail. Something terrible had happened, and it had happened to Mama. How did Cixin know this? He knew.

  And underneath: that other knowing, half memory and half dream, already faded and yet somehow more real even than Auntie’s tears or the big man’s strange red hair:

  Cixin. Come. Cixin.

  The big man was Cousin Benjamin Jinkang Molloy. Cixin tasted the ridiculous name on his tongue. Despite the red hair, Cousin Ben sometimes looked Chinese, but mostly he did not. That made no sense, but then neither did anything else.

  Auntie didn’t like Cousin Ben. She didn’t say so, but she wouldn’t look at him, didn’t offer him tea, frowned when his back was turned and she wasn’t crying or at her shrine. Ben visited every day, at first with his “translator” and then, when he saw how well Cixin spoke the secret language, alone. He paid money to Xiao’s father to sleep at Xiao’s house. Xiao was not allowed to visit Cixin at his bed.

  He said, “Why can you talk Mama’s secret words?”

  “It’s English. Where I live, everybody speaks English.”

  “Do you live in Tibet?” That would be exciting!

  “No. I live in America.”

  Cixin considered this. America might be exciting, too—Xiao’s iPod came from there. Sudden tears pricked Cixin’s eyes. He wanted to see Xiao. He wanted Mama, who was as dead as the dog in the road. He wanted an iPod. He wanted to get out of bed and race around but his body hurt and anyway Auntie wouldn’t let him get up.

  Ben said carefully, “Cixin, what happened to you up on the mountain?”

  “I got lost.”

  “I know. I found you, remember? But what happened before that?”

  “Nothing.” Cixin closed his lips tight. He didn’t actually remember what had happened on the mountain, only that something had. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to share it with some strange red-headed cousin who wasn’t even from Tibet. It was his. Maybe if Mama hadn’t got dead . . .

  The tears came then and Cixin, ashamed, turned his face toward the wall. Gently Ben turned it back.

  “I know you miss your mother, buddy. But my time here is short and I need you to pay attention.”

  That was just stupid. People needed food and water and clothes and iPods—they didn’t “need” Cixin’s attention. He scowled.

  Ben said, “Listen to me. It’s very important that you go on taking the pills your mother was giving you.”

  “You mean the once-a-week?”

  “Yes. I’m going to show you exactly how much to take, and you must do it every single week.”

  “I know. Or I will die.”

  Ben shut his eyes, then opened them again. “Is that what she told you?”

  “Yes.” Something inside him trembled, like a tremor deep in the earth. “Is it true?”

  “Yes. It’s true. In a very important way.”

  “Okay.” All at once Cixin liked speaking the secret language again. It made Mama seem closer, and it made Cixin special. Suddenly he had a thought that made him jerk upright in bed, rattling his head. “Are you really from America?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Mama was, too?”

  “She lived there for a while, yes.”

  “She liked it there?”

  “Yes, I think she did.”

  “Take me to America with you!”

  Ben didn’t look surprised—why not? Cixin himself was surprised by his thought: surprised, delighted, frightened. In America he would be away from the village boys, away from the school that threw him out. In America he could have an iPod. “Please, Cousin Ben, please please please!”

  “Cixin, I can’t. Auntie is your closest relative and she—”

  “She’s not really my Auntie! She was Mama’s amah, is all! You’re my elder cousin!”

  Ben said gently, “She loves you.”

  Cixin fell back on his bed, hurting his head even more. Love. Mama loved him and she died and left him. Auntie loved him and she was keeping him from going to America. Cousin Ben didn’t love him or he would take him away from this evil village. Love was terrible and ugly. Cixin glared savagely at this horrible cousin. “Then after you go I won’t take my once-a-week and I will die!”

  Ben stood. “I will not be blackmailed by a nine-year-old.”

  Cixin didn’t know what “blackmail” was, but it sounded evil. Everywhere he was surrounded by evil. Better to die. Again he turned his face to the wall.

  Later, he would always think that had made the difference. His silence, his turning away. If he had fought back, Ben would have said more about blackmail and gone away, angry. But instead he ran his hand through his red hair until it stood up like bristly grass—Cixin could just see this out of the corner of his eye—and then put his hand over his face.

  “All right, Cixin. I’ll take you to America. But I warn you, it may take a long, long time to arrange.”

  Six: Ben

  It took nearly two years.

  If Ben hadn’t had family contacts at the State Department, it would have been even longer, might have been impossible. The Chinese were discouraging foreign adoptions; Cixin was from within formerly quarantined Sichuan; the death certificate for Haihong needed to be obtained from a glacially slow bureaucracy
and presented in triplicate. But on the other hand, Chinese-American relations were in a positive phase. Ben could prove Haihong had been his second cousin. Ben had received a Citizens’ Commendation from the FBI for exposing the surrogate-ring of American girls exploited by a sleazy Mexican fertility clinic. And Uncle James was on the State desk for East Asia.

  During those two years, Ben sent Auntie money and Cixin presents. An iPod, which seemed to be a critical object. Jeans and sneakers. Later, a laptop, to be used at the vineyard foreman’s house to communicate with Ben. They exchanged email, and Cixin’s troubled Ben. Fluent in spoken English, Cixin was barely literate in any language, and he didn’t seem to be learning much from the school software Ben supplied.

  Cuzin Ben this is Cixin. Wen r yu comin 4 me. Anty is sik agen. Evrybuddy hates me. I hate it hear. Com soon or I wil die.

  Cixin

  Cixin—

  I am making plans to bring you here as fast as I can. Please be patient.

  Could Cixin read that word? Maybe not. The backward connection at the foreman’s house didn’t permit even such a basic tool as a camlink.

  Please wait without fuss.

  Haihong saying during her pregnancy, “Ben, please don’t fuss at me!”

  Take your once-a-week, use your school software, and be good.

  What else? How did you write to a child you’d barely met?

  You will like America. Soon, I hope.

  Ben